The Republican Regime
i
We are introduced to the Republican regime in Coriolanus in a moment of crisis. Faced with open rebellion against their authority, the city’s rulers must give an account of themselves:
I tell you, friends, most charitable care
Have the patricians of you. For your wants,
Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them
Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
Appear in your impediment. For the dearth,
The gods, not the patricians, make it, and
Your knees to them (not arms) must help.
[I.i.65–74]
Menenius begins his defense of patrician rule sensibly, from our point of view, by assuring the plebeians that the Senate does care about them. We would expect him to continue with detailed evidence of the Senate’s care, perhaps an explanation of the measures being taken to alleviate the famine in Rome, at least a declaration of the Senate’s intention to do something about the problem. But Menenius says nothing of the kind, and the ease with which he dismisses the “wants” of the plebeians leaves us wondering in what way the Senate can care about them, especially if it claims to be unmoved by their “suffering in this dearth.” In lines 67–72, Menenius creates a powerful image of the Senate’s utter indifference to the demands of the plebeians. As he pictures it, the “Roman state” is not rooted in the soil of the Roman people, deriving its power from them, but is instead raised far above them, as high as the heavens, and seems to have a motive force of its own, sufficient to crush any number of its citizens who might get in its way. Whatever Menenius’ notion of the state may be, it seems to fly in the face of all our ideas of the proper relation of a government to its people.
Given our bewilderment at his reasoning with the plebeians, we must question whether Menenius is talking about a “state” in our modern sense at all. In view of the way he speaks of the Roman gods, for example, he apparently knows nothing about our idea of “state” being clearly separate from “church,” a distinction that reflects the modern belief in dimensions of life beyond the political. From our standpoint, we cannot help being struck by the way Menenius indiscriminately mixes religion and politics in his address to the plebeians. He identifies rebellion against the “Roman state” with impiety to the Roman gods, and moreover speaks as if the state and the gods were on the same level. This attitude is common among Shakespeare’s Romans, who repeatedly assume that the gods take a particular, almost proprietary, interest in their city’s affairs (I.vi.6–9, III.i.288–92, IV.vi.36). In reproaching the tribunes for their part in banishing Coriolanus, Menenius finally equates respect for the gods with civic justice:
Sicinius. The gods be good unto us!
Menenius. No, in such a case the gods will not be good unto us. When we banish’d him, we respected not them; and, he returning to break our necks, they respect not us.
[V.iv.30–34]
To Menenius, the gods themselves are apparently political beings who treat the specifically political actions of their worshipers as signs of respect or disrespect, and reward or punish them accordingly. The connection made in Rome between injustice and impiety clearly heightens what is at stake in the politics of the city, heightens the “Roman state” itself, in Menenius’ metaphor, until it seems to encompass even the sky. Taken in all seriousness, Menenius’ image of the plebeians lifting their staves skyward would lead to the assertion that the horizon of Rome and the horizon of heaven are coextensive, or, to put it differently, in Shakespeare’s Rome even the gods are in some sense included within the precincts of the city. Clearly this aspiration to totality on the part of the Roman community goes beyond the claims of the modern state as we conceive it.
Examining the status of the gods in Coriolanus, then, one realizes that the play does not portray a state in the modem sense, but rather a city in the ancient sense, a polis.1 The clearest indication of this fact is the presence of a civic religion in Shakespeare’s Rome, but there are other important ways in which the community portrayed in Coriolanus differs from a modern state, and we must bear them in mind to avoid analyzing the play with concepts foreign to its subject matter. For example, with our notion of representative government, we think that rulers should reflect the values or opinions of those they rule, more generally that a government should take its character from the society out of which it arises. But in the classical understanding of the polis, the regime (politeia) has a formative role, and is itself the primary factor in shaping or giving character to the community it rules.2 Some such notion of rule is necessary to make sense out of Menenius’ two-fold claim that the Senate can care for the plebeians and at the same time disregard their wants. He must believe that the patricians understand what is in the interest of the plebeians better than the plebeians themselves do, but he leaves it to the less politic and more outspoken Coriolanus to give a direct statement of the patrician position to the plebeians:
your affections are
A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil.
[I.i.177–79]
Because Coriolanus believes the plebeians are utterly incapable of comprehending political realities in Rome (I.i.190–96), he feels the Senate should treat them like children, restraining their desires against their will:
Let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison.
[III.i.156–57]
Clearly, for Coriolanus, ruling does not involve representing the will of those ruled but in fact opposing it. We may find this view distasteful, but we must make an effort to understand it in order to avoid simply remaking Shakespeare’s Rome in our minds on the model of a modern state. Perhaps what is most needed at the start of any study of Coriolanus is a frank admission of how alien the political world presented in the play is to us.
The most important point to glean from the statements by Menenius and Coriolanus concerning rule in Rome is that an authoritative idea of the good prevails in the city, a notion of what the good life for man is that is actively supported by the regime.3 This point becomes explicit in the elaborate oration Cominius delivers in praise of Coriolanus before the assembled citizenry of Rome, a speech which reveals the one trait the city encourages above all others:
It is held
That valor is the chiefest virtue, and
Most dignifies the haver; if it be,
The man I speak of cannot in the world
Be singly counterpois’d.
[II.ii.83–87]
This speech is carefully phrased to stress that Cominius is expressing one city’s opinion (“It is held,” “If it be . . .”). Another city might well hold justice, for example, or piety to be the “chiefest virtue,” in which case Coriolanus would not be regarded as the highest human type. But in Rome he is the man everyone looks up to, and as such becomes the authoritative type in the city, the model for imitation. The admiration Rome bestows upon him is the city’s way of directing its citizens (above all, its youth) to the cultivation of martial virtue. As Cominius points out, in the heat of battle, Coriolanus can “by his rare example” make even “the coward / Turn terror into sport” (II.ii.104–5).
As one reads on in Cominius’ speech, and finds Coriolanus called “a thing of blood” (l.109) and then “a planet” (l.114), one might begin to feel that in his concern that “the deeds of Coriolanus . . . not be utter’d feebly” (ll.82–83), Cominius is getting carried away with his own rhetoric. There is unquestionably something hyperbolic about Cominius’ speech. But that is just the point: Rome’s praise of its military heroes is one-sided and exaggerated. The city does not, and could not, honor all forms of human excellence equally, but has instead singled out the courageous warrior for public esteem. Cominius’ speech culminates in a direct tribute to Coriolanus’ spiritedness and his consequent indifference to the demands of his body:
then straight his doubled spirit
Requick’ned what in flesh was fatigate,
And to the battle came he, where he did
Run reeking o’er the lives of men, as if
’Twere a perpetual spoil; and till we call’d
Both field and city ours, he never stood
To ease his breast with panting.
[II.ii.116–22]
Cominius’ speech gives some idea of why spiritedness prevails among the Republican Romans in Coriolanus. Rome deliberately fosters the opinion that the best way of life is that of the public-spirited warrior. When he praises Coriolanus, Cominius is not speaking simply for himself but for the whole Roman community (II.ii.49–51). The style of his oration—the complicated syntax, the elevated diction and epic similes, the amplitude with which he expresses himself—serves to lift his speech above the level of merely private utterance.4 He talks with the dignity and measured pace of a man who knows that he has a solemn public duty to perform and fears that he may not be equal to the task (ll.82, 103). But as he rises to the occasion, one can picture his listeners nodding in agreement with his weighty statements of his grave theme. The scene has a ritual quality to it, a celebration of communal values through the praise bestowed upon one great exemplar of them.
But Rome’s support for public spiritedness is not merely a matter of speeches. The sum of the honors heaped upon the military victor in the first two acts of Coriolanus shows how great a premium the Republic places upon martial valor. Caius Martius is offered a tenth of the spoils of battle (I.ix.31–36), awarded the “war’s garland” (l.60), given the consul’s own “noble steed” (l.61), and finally receives the name of Coriolanus (ll.62–66) as a perpetual memorial to his victory. The honors Coriolanus receives on the battlefield are, however, only the prelude to even greater honors showered upon him when he returns to Rome. The whole city turns out to welcome the hero home, as he celebrates what came to be known as a Roman triumph. Soon we learn that the Senate wishes to make him consul, and although he never achieves the office, in the ordinary course of Roman events a man with his record surely would (ll.i.221–22). For men who display public spiritedness, Rome has positions of authority to offer, rewarding their passion for honor, not only with speeches, garlands, and triumphs, but also with public offices. As we have already seen, the Republic’s ability to make room at the top for its ambitious and spirited men enables the regime to draw its citizens into political life.
The Rome of Coriolanus is, then, lavish with the honors it bestows upon public service, but so far the only form of service we have seen acknowledged in the city is military. This situation is all very well for the patricians, who are trained in warfare almost from birth (I.iii.5–15), but what of the plebeians, who cannot expect to perform the wonders in battle that a Coriolanus can? Unless the patricians have a monopoly on spiritedness, the Roman regime apparently has to deal somehow with the ambitious among the plebeians to keep them attached to the cause of the city, too. The answer to this problem in Republican Rome turns out to be the tribunate, which serves more or less the same function for the plebeians that the consulship does for the patricians. Coriolanus opens with the creation of the tribunate, and when one considers how peculiar a response to the uprising this is—it is twice referred to in the play as “strange” (I.i.210, 221)—one begins to suspect the purpose of the institution. The plebeians demand grain and instead get the right to elect five officers. Evidently the patricians are more concerned about the political ambitions of the leaders of the rebellion than about the desires of the plebeian class as a whole. As is evident from the opening scene, the plebeians must be actively led in revolt. The man labeled “First Citizen” is necessary to incite the mob, to direct its fury, and to counter any objections, whether from his own ranks (the Second Citizen) or from the opposition (Menenius). His aggressiveness stamps him as the spirited member of the plebeian party, and the patricians apparently realize that they must direct their efforts at placating such men. Simply to give the grain to the plebeians might satisfy their desires for the moment, but it would also increase the authority of the inciters of the rebellion without at all satisfying their personal ambition. The creation of the tribunate, on the other hand, while it does nothing about the demands of the people at large, does appeal to the real movers of the uprising by giving them an office of their own to which they can aspire. Perhaps Shakespeare had in mind the wry comment in North’s Plutarch on the filling of the newly created positions: “So Junius Brutus and Sicinius Vellutus were the first Tribunes of the People that were chosen, who had only been the causers and procurers of this sedition.”5 In an ironic twist, the most revolutionary of Romans become the leading spokesmen for conservatism once they are given a stake in the status quo. Shortly after they have secured a change in the existing order themselves, the tribunes begin to insist on the “old prerogative” (III.iii.17) and speak in favor of “all season’d office” in Rome (III.iii.64), while attacking Coriolanus as a “traitorous innovator / A foe to th’ public weal” (III.i.174–75). By creating the tribunate the city has won new defenders for itself from the ranks of its bitterest enemies.6
Shakespeare developed the two tribunes into important characters from the barest hints in Plutarch, revealing a sound grasp of the active role the plebeians played in the politics of Rome. Shown basking in the affection and admiration of their fellow plebeians (IV.vi.20–25), Sicinius and Brutus evidently take great pride in their newly found position in the community. Like many of the patricians, the tribunes want to be honored and are willing to do public service to attain distinction. What makes them appear a good deal less impressive than a Coriolanus is a certain pettiness, a lack of grandeur in their goals. With their narrower perspective, they take the day-to-day affairs of the city more seriously than Menenius thinks fit, in part because they are concerned about appearing important in the eyes of their fellow plebeians:
You are ambitious for poor knaves’ caps and legs. You wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange-wife and a forset-seller, and then rejourn the controversy of threepence to a second day of audience.
[II.i.68–72]
Menenius is making fun of the tribunes’ exaggerated conception of their own role in the city, which leads them to mimic the demeanor of graver magistrates in Rome. From the standpoint of a patrician concerned with the fate of the city as a whole, a “controversy of threepence” will inevitably appear trivial and somewhat comic. Perhaps Rome is fortunate, however, that somebody is willing to take an interest in such matters, even if the result is to leave them “the more entangled” (l. 77). Since the tribunes are ambitious only “for poor knaves’ caps and legs,” they are content with their somewhat limited office in the city. As a consequence, the Roman Republic can offer an active political life to both plebeians and patricians, involving its citizens in activities that give their public spiritedness a chance to develop.
While the city is working to cultivate spiritedness, it also is striving to keep the force of eros in check, to channel it in “legitimate” directions. Love occurs in Coriolanus only in the context of marriage, that is, in a lawful form over which the city can maintain control. The marriage of Coriolanus and Virgilia illustrates the austere Roman ideal of love, a partnership in which the clear subordination of the wife’s interest to the husband’s reflects the more basic subordination of the love as a whole to the good of the city. Virgilia must be content to stay at home while her husband goes off to war (I.iii.71–75): her love must not in any way interfere with the needs of Rome. Moreover, the restraint of eros in Republican Rome is evident from the play’s emphasis on marital fidelity. Virgilia is compared to Penelope (I.iii.82), the model of that virtue, and her husband is no less faithful to his marriage vows:
Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss
I carried from thee, dear; and my true lip
Hath virgin’d it e’er since.
[V.iii.46–48]
Finally, two scenes in Coriolanus showing three generations of Romans together in one family unit (I.iii and V.iii), indicate the purpose of love and marriage in Rome. The family is the institution by means of which Rome can use even the force of eros for the good of the city, by directing it toward the goal of generation. In the Roman Republic, generation is presented as a matter of framing warriors (V.iii.62–63), and therefore as an extension of the city’s own goal of encouraging spiritedness. The model of motherhood in Coriolanus seems to be Hecuba suckling Hector (I.iii.40–41), and what Coriolanus took in at his mother’s breasts was the same “valiantness” (III.ii.129) that is held to be the “chiefest virtue” in Rome. One would think that the realm of love, marriage, and the family would be a source of private interest even in the Roman Republic, but at least at first sight the city seems able to make eros serve spiritedness, and thus in turn the common good.
ii
In its effort to restrain eros, the Roman regime cannot simply allow the spiritedness it calls forth to go unchecked. With its single-minded concern for doing what is noble, spiritedness can often lead men to act irrationally, without regard for their own welfare or safety. As is said of Coriolanus:
His nature is too noble for the world; . . .
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent,
And, being angry, does forget that ever
He heard the name of death.
[III.i.254, 257–59]
In particular, because Coriolanus cannot imagine how anyone could fail to live, as he does, strictly according to the dictates of honor, he becomes incapable of appreciating the importance of eros in human life. He enters the first scene asking “What’s the matter?” as if the motive for the uprising were something mysterious. He seems genuinely puzzled that the plebeians could be so worried about merely filling their bellies and staying alive:
They said they were an-hungry; sigh’d forth proverbs—
That hunger broke stone walls, that dogs must eat,
That meat was made for mouths, that the gods sent not
Corn for the rich men only. With these shreds
They vented their complainings.
[I.i.205–9]
Because the proverbs of the plebeians all embody the practical wisdom of self-preservation, they are no more than “shreds” to Coriolanus in his whole-hearted concern for the noble life. In his attitude we witness how Roman austerity can get out of hand: he would rather see the plebeians starve than risk giving encouragement to their appetite by any official recognition of the fact that men need to eat. Certainly some of the claims of eros are legitimate, even from the standpoint of a noble and warlike city. If men stopped eating altogether, they would soon be too weak to fight, and universal chastity would leave Rome without any warriors at all in one generation. For Rome to suppress eros entirely would, in fact, be impossible, but the city does not even try to make all its citizens into spirited men. As Shakespeare portrays Rome in Coriolanus, the city seems content with a compromise, a blend of spirited and appetitive7 men in the community. Rome fundamentally supports the spiritedness in men, but at the same time it makes important concessions to eros, in effect using the force of eros to moderate the extreme claims of spiritedness. This compromise is reflected in the political organization of Rome, the division of the city into patrician and plebeian parties.
One might at first be tempted to make a simple formula, and identify the plebeians as the party of eros in Rome and the patricians as the party of spiritedness. But although the division of the city into patricians and plebeians is not irrelevant to the division into spirited and appetitive men, the two divisions do not exactly correspond. We have just seen that the tribunate was necessary in Rome to accommodate the spirited men among the plebeians. By the same token, a glance at Menenius confirms the presence of appetitive men in the patrician party, even in the early days of the Republic. Thinking in terms of food comes naturally to him (II.i.55–57, V.iv.17–18),8 and when he sets out to define his own character, he immediately makes reference to his appetite:
I am known to be a humorous patrician, and one that loves a cup of hot wine with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t.
[II.i.47–49]
Apparently each party in Rome includes both appetitive and spirited men, though in different proportions. In the opening scene of Coriolanus the appetitive nature of both parties is emphasized, since Shakespeare focuses on food as the issue in the plebeians’ rebellion. In Plutarch’s version, the original revolt is occasioned by the Senate’s support of the city’s usurers, and the issue of the scarcity of grain does not come up until after Coriolanus’ battles with the Volsces. Shakespeare pushes the issue of usury into the background (I.i.81–82) and brings the issue of grain to the fore. The appetitive character of the plebeians is stressed as soon as Coriolanus enters and begins speaking of their “sick man’s appetite” (I.i.178) and predicting that, left to themselves, they will “feed on one another” (I.i.188). And with Menenius as the initial spokesman for the patrician party, the first image of the Senate we get is, somewhat surprisingly, a belly. To be sure, Menenius is able to make his analogy work to his advantage, but he may at the same time be unwittingly revealing much about himself and his fellow patricians by the way he chooses to portray their role in the city.9 Less dazzled by Menenius’ rhetoric than the naive plebeians are, we come away from his speech remembering his original characterization of the Senate as stomach of Rome: “idle and unactive / Still cupboarding the viand” (I.i.99–100). At first sight in Coriolanus, we can find no more difference between a patrician and a plebeian than between a full and an empty stomach.
And yet this difference need not be insignificant or trivial, for it suggests why patricians and plebeians might develop along different lines in the city. With their bellies crying out for satisfaction, the plebeians find it hard to rise above the level of appetite, whereas the patricians, “still cupboarding the viand,” can afford to scorn their bellies. These distinctions are rooted in the fact that the patricians are rich and the plebeians poor, a division in effect legislated by the city, since the laws play a large role in determining how wealth is distributed among men. The First Citizen raises this point when he replies to Menenius’ claim that the Senate cares for the plebeians “like fathers”:
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 establish’d against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor.
[I.i.79–85]
The laws can favor either the poor at the expense of the rich or the rich at the expense of the poor. Shakespeare, following Plutarch,10 shows that Roman legislation fosters inequality of wealth, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. The point is not simply that the patricians are wealthy but that they hold their wealth by privilege, a privilege which helps explain why they are more likely to develop spiritedness than the plebeians.
The privileged status of the patricians relieves them of the need to worry about money. Since they are born to wealth, they do not have to work to accumulate it, and, with the laws supporting them, they hold their wealth securely. Acting with noble contempt for money is obviously easier for someone who has never truly faced the prospect of being poor. In the case of Brutus in Julius Caesar, we can see clearly that a man can maintain his noble indifference to wealth only so long as he does not have to concern himself about its acquisition. In his quarrel with Cassius, Brutus can still speak of money as “vile trash” (IV.iii.74), but he also implies that without money he could not act with noble liberality to his friends (ll.79–82). He falls into the contradiction of condemning Cassius for taking “base bribes” (IV.iii.24) and then demanding a share of the booty because he himself “can raise no money by vile means” (IV.iii.71), and yet needs it to pay his legions. In Act IV, scene iii, of Julius Caesar we get a glimpse of what happens to Roman nobility once the patrician privilege of wealth is taken away: it begins to look hollow, as hollow as an empty cashbox. The lesson to be learned from Brutus is that Roman nobility depends on an adequate supply of “means,” since men must be relieved of certain low concerns if they are to devote themselves to the concerns thought high by the city. The Roman patricians are given the luxury of developing their spiritedness, and therefore have an obligation to do so. By contrast, Rome leaves the plebeians poor to maintain the pressure of necessity on them, keeping their desires simple and their sights low, focused on the basics of life. As long as the plebeians have to worry about merely staying alive, they will find it hard to give attention to grand public matters or to develop ambition for political life. Hence their poverty works against the development of public-spirited men in their class.11
Nevertheless, being born to wealth in Rome cannot guarantee that any given patrician will become a spirited man, and by the same token the poverty of the plebeians cannot prevent the emergence of spiritedness among them. All one can say is that the distribution of wealth and privilege in Rome favors the growth of spiritedness among the patricians and works against it among the plebeians. One might wonder why Rome does not organize itself into a party of spirited men and a party of appetitive men. To be rational, the city ought to classify its citizens according to their natures rather than the chance circumstances of their birth. But if Rome were to divide along the lines of natural, as opposed to conventional, distinctions, it would become two different cities, with nothing in common and no means of communication between them. A party composed entirely of men like Coriolanus would be utterly indifferent to the concerns of the appetitive men in the community, perhaps altogether incapable of understanding them, but in any case too proud to make any compromises with those who did not share their single-minded concern for nobility. On the other hand, a party composed entirely of appetitive men would lack the spiritedness necessary to stand up and fight for their rights in the city. The plebeians in Coriolanus need more than hunger to impel them to rebellion; they need some of the irrational willingness to risk their lives that only spiritedness can give them. They must become so morally indignant at their treatment at the hands of the patricians that they “are all resolv’d rather to die than famish” (I.i.4–5). When contemplating the prospect of unmixed parties in Rome, one ought to bear in mind that the scheme in Plato’s Republic for dividing the best city into artisans and warriors according to their natures requires the supervision of a third class of wise rulers. But no such authority is raised above both patricians and plebeians in Shakespeare’s Rome, a point made obliquely but tellingly by the fable of the belly. It certainly is, at least on first thought, puzzling to find the Senate compared to the belly, and not the head or the heart.12 Menenius’ fable suggests what is absent from Rome, a guiding mind in the city. Checking the list of civic functions provided by the First Citizen’s attempt to turn Menenius’ tale against him, one finds the city well supplied with soldiers, steeds, and trumpeters (I.i.116–17), but one searches in vain for the precise location of “the kingly crowned head, the vigilant eye, / The counsellor heart” (I.i.115–16).13 In the absence of a separate class embodying these functions to oversee the division of the city, Rome is forced to leave the composition of each party at least in part to chance, and to allow in each a blending of appetitive and spirited men.
In assessing the effect of the mixed parties in Rome, one realizes first that the appetitive men in the patrician class serve to moderate its spiritedness. They themselves can make their fellow patricians aware of the claims of eros, and also are the means of communicating with the plebeians. However ineffectual he may be at times, Menenius, the appetitive man in the patrician party, is on the whole the most important mediating factor in the disputes of Rome. He can speak to both the plebeians and Coriolanus because he shares an appetitive nature with the one and patrician status with the other. Similarly, the spirited men in the plebeian party are needed to speak up for the rights of their class in the city. The spiritedness of the tribunes acts in the service of the eros of their fellow plebeians. Even though they may have their own goals foremost in mind, the tribunes do serve as “the people’s mouths,” giving voice to the hunger of Rome and working to make the patricians consider it as a factor in their calculations. Significantly, Menenius and the tribunes often appear together (II.i.1–96, IV.vi.10–79, V.iv), and any real communication that takes place between the two parties in Rome is the result of their exchanges (consider especially III.i.263–334). The net effect of the mixed composition of the Roman parties is to check the potentially extreme spiritedness of the patricians. First the appetitive men within the patrician class work to restrain the immoderate pride of some of their party. If the patricians cannot control one of their number, the power of the tribunes comes into play, as shown in the rejection of Coriolanus as consul and his eventual banishment. The Roman parties must be understood to function as a classic example of a system of check and balances.
As Shakespeare portrays Rome in Coriolanus, the Senate basically rules the city. It deliberates and decides on the most important foreign and domestic matters, such as declaring war or distributing grain. The Senate also chooses the two consuls, the highest officers of the Republic and commanders of its armies. But the Senate’s rule is by no means absolute, since through their tribunes the plebeians have a veto power over anything it proposes (III.i.144–46). The Senate is therefore forced to take the interest of the plebeians into account in its deliberations. It must pass laws that are acceptable to the whole city, and not just to the patrician class. Furthermore, the Senate can only nominate men for the consulship; the plebeians must ratify its choices. A patrician who wants to become consul must be willing to make concessions to the plebeians. As the case of Coriolanus shows, no man who holds the plebeians in total contempt can become consul, or at least no man who is willing to show his contempt openly. “The price” of the consulship is, as Coriolanus learns, “to ask it kindly” (II.iii.75). The plebeians, who are chiefly characterized in terms of their appetite, see to it that not even the noblest Roman can disregard the needs of the body completely. The patrician who makes no allowance for the eros of the plebeians is banished from the city.14
iii
In its attempt to balance political forces in the community, the Republic threatens to go from one extreme to another. The power given to the plebeians to check immoderate spiritedness among the patricians could itself get out of hand. The plebeians could block all laws and keep the consulship vacant if they were willing to veto everything the Senate proposed. One might well wonder if anything checks the plebeians’ power to bring the city to a standstill. Shakespeare is in fact careful to portray those aspects of the plebeians’ character and situation which prevent them from abusing their power. First, the plebeians have only just acquired their political rights in Coriolanus and do not hold them securely. Even the tribunes are unaccustomed to exercising their authority and use it with restraint, as shown by their caution after the banishment of Coriolanus:
Sicinius. Bid them all home, he’s gone; and we’ll no further.
The nobility are vexed, whom we see have sided
In his behalf.
Brutus. Now we have shown our power,
Let us seem humbler after it is done
Than when it was a-doing.
[IV.ii.1–5]
If the patricians are pushed too far by the tribunes, they might rescind the power recently granted the plebeians (IV.iii.21–24), a consideration which inhibits Sicinius and Brutus.
The ordinary citizens of Rome are even more circumspect than the tribunes in asserting themselves in the community. At least some of them possess a healthy sense of their own inadequacy to rule themselves. When the First Citizen charges Coriolanus with calling the people “the many-headed multitude,” the Third Citizen goes to his enemy’s defense:
We have been call’d so of many, not that our heads are some brown, some black, some abram, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely color’d; and truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points a’ th’ compass.
[II.iii.16–24]
Although flatterers of the people are at work in the Rome of Coriolanus (II.ii.7–8, 24–27), they have not yet succeeded in convincing the ordinary citizens that they are equal to the patricians in virtue and wisdom. On the contrary, the plebeians still look up to the patricians and admire them for the services they have performed for the city (I.i.30–31, II.iii.132–33). The fact that the plebeians are ashamed to appear ungrateful to men who have aided Rome is the most important reason why they hesitate to use their veto against Coriolanus:
We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power we have no power to do; for if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them; so, if he tell us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them. Ingratitude is monstrous, and for the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of the multitude; of which we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members.
[II.iii.4–13]
This concern for appearing noble in the eyes of their superiors makes the plebeians come close to allowing their avowed and inveterate enemy, Coriolanus, to become consul.
Even the electoral procedures of Republican Rome are contrived to make the plebeians’ sense of shame work to the patricians’ advantage. There is no secret ballot in Coriolanus: the people have to “give their voices” openly, and in a direct confrontation are embarrassed to use their veto on a candidate for consul. To make matters more difficult for the easily intimidated plebeians, they have to approach the candidate “by ones, by twos, and by threes” (II.iii.41–43). Like Swift’s Lilliputians, the only strength they have is in numbers (II.i.34–38); one at a time they are no match for the giant Coriolanus. He surely exaggerates when he says that the plebeians stand “still, and wonder” whenever a patrician merely gets up “to speak of peace or war” (III.ii.11–13), but Coriolanus is able to bring them to a halt, even at the height of their collective rage, simply by reminding them: “There’s some among you have beheld me fighting” (III.i.223). Having served in the wars, the plebeians may well suspect that Coriolanus’ boast–“On fair ground/I could beat forty of them” (III.i.241–42)—is not an empty one, and they will not risk angering him when they have to meet him face-to-face.
Finally, in trying to keep the plebeians in their place, the patricians are able to enlist the Roman gods on their side. Coriolanus’ scornful question to the rebels in the opening scene contains an ambiguity:
What’s the matter,
That in these several places of the city
You cry against the noble Senate, who,
(Under the gods) keep you in awe, which else
Would feed on one another?
[I.i.179–83]
One might well ask, Who is “under the gods” here, the Senate or the plebeians, and of whom are the plebeians “in awe,” the gods or the Senate? Undoubtedly Coriolanus wants to say that the Senate, in obedience to the gods, keeps the plebeians pious, but the same lines without much twisting could indicate that by means of the gods the Senate keeps the plebeians in awe of itself. We have already noted Menenius’ manipulation of the plebeians’ piety to maintain their allegiance to Rome. The plebeians are characterized by a religious awe that can be readily directed toward the city’s gods or a patrician who has achieved godlike deeds, such as Coriolanus:
I have seen the dumb men throng to see him, and
The blind to hear him speak.
[II.i.262–63]
If a single patrician can call forth this sort of worship from the plebeians, the party as a whole should be able to maintain control of the city. In fact, the real danger to the Republic stems, not from plebeian disrespect for nobility, but from the readiness with which the plebeians are willing to fall down before the military heroes of the city. A commander willing to court the favor of the plebeians could use their support as leverage against his fellow patricians and make himself sole master of Rome, thus ending aristocratic equality in the city. Coriolanus does not take advantage of the credit his military victories give him with the plebeians, but his story suggests that Rome is waiting like “mellow fruit” (IV.vi.100) to fall into the hands of the first general willing to strive with any and all means for mastership in the city.
That general turns out to be Julius Caesar, who is not inhibited by those considerations of honor which restrain Coriolanus from exploiting his reputation with the plebeians. The difference between the two is indicated by the fact that Caesar is willing to put himself on display before the plebeians:
If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him, according as he pleas’d and displeas’d them, as they use to do the players in the theatre, I am no true man.
[I.ii.258–61]
Evidently not sharing Coriolanus’ shame at acting a part in Rome,15 Caesar is able to win the plebeians over to his side, defeat all his rivals among the patricians, and bring the Republican era in Rome to its close. By considering what finally destroys the Republic in Julius Caesar, one becomes aware of what in the deepest sense makes it work in Coriolanus. The Republican regime depends on a very delicate (though remarkably durable) balance between the parties in the city. Patrician and plebeian must understand that they do have a certain common interest, but they must at the same time keep their distance from each other. In speaking of Coriolanus, Menenius reveals exactly what the Republican regime requires:
He loves your people,
But tie him not to be their bedfellow.
[II.ii.64–65]
Some degree of respect and regard is needed between the hostile parties in Rome, but it must stop short of real fraternizing with the enemy, for any alliance of patricians and plebeians would upset the balance of power on which the Republic is based. The Republic can survive only if its citizens do not break ranks once they have divided up along party lines, and above all, only if the patricians maintain their class solidarity. The Republic seems finally dependent on the class prejudices of its citizens, the fact that the plebeians do not trust the patricians, and the patricians quite simply cannot stand the smell of the plebeians. Once the plebeians begin following a powerful patrician against the advice of their own tribunes (Julius Caesar, I.i), or, more importantly, once the patricians cease to quarrel among themselves but take their disputes to the plebeians for arbitration (Julius Caesar, III.ii), the Republic is doomed.
The corruption of the plebeians in Julius Caesar16 confirms the point that the Republican regime can function only as long as the people realize their unfitness for rule and are willing to defer to the Senate’s government, though not to submit to it docilely. This is the paradox of the Republican regime: the plebeians must accept the Senate’s right to rule, and yet dispute bitterly the way it rules, as they do in the opening scene of Coriolanus. Coriolanus’ characterization of the plebeians as “such as cannot rule / Nor ever will be ruled” (III.i.40–41) reveals, not as he thinks their defect, but their virtue in the context of the Roman regime. With continual tension between the parties in Rome, no one man can gain control of the whole city. Only if individual patricians are unable to use the plebeian party for their personal purposes can the people of Rome be safely entrusted with as much constitutional authority as the Republic gives them. Under the proper conditions, the plebeians’ share in the regime serves to prevent the spiritedness of the city’s warriors from running counter to the ordinary necessities of life, without at the same time redirecting Rome from the noble goal of martial glory to the mere satisfaction of the body’s appetites.
To understand the durability of the party loyalties on which the durability of the Republic rests, one must refer back to the unique character of the ancient city, of the power of a narrow-horizoned, tradition-bound community to mold its citizens. For example, to see through his party loyalty Coriolanus would have to understand that in a very real sense he has more in common with Sicinius than with Menenius, that sharing a spirited nature with the one is in some ways more significant than sharing a party label with the other. But that recognition would require Coriolanus to overcome his almost physical revulsion at all things plebeian, and to unlearn everything his breeding and training have taught him about what is praiseworthy. He would have to understand what is naturally, rather than conventionally, worth valuing. But the city has a way of making the conventional look like the natural, as is evident in Act II, scene i, when Menenius and the two tribunes vainly try to break through their party opinions in order to understand each other’s viewpoints.
According to Sicinius, the people hate Coriolanus because “Nature teaches beasts to know their friends” (II.i.6). Of course, for the plebeians to hate Coriolanus is in part natural, but their reaction to him is also in part the conventional response of their class to anyone of the opposite rank in the city. That is just the point: the plebeians’ opinions are formed of one part nature, one part convention, but they cannot distinguish the two components in their minds.17 Sicinius states his attitude toward Coriolanus, not as one man’s opinion, not even as a party slogan, but as a universal truth of nature. Clearly Rome wants its citizens to believe that what it teaches them is the same as what nature teaches, for this will make their beliefs more fixed. Judging by the exchange between Menenius and the tribunes (II.i.7–12), each party in Rome thinks its position can be defended by appealing to natural analogies, and as we listen to patrician and plebeian argue back and forth, apparently in all seriousness, over whether Coriolanus is best understood on the model of a “lamb” or a “bear,” we realize how childishly stubborn partisanship in Rome can become. Perhaps Shakespeare is suggesting that party opinion in Rome is ultimately on the level of beast fables, that is, morally edifying lessons told in a form which even children can understand and remember. In studying the Republican regime, we finally come back to the point we started from, that there is an authoritative idea of the good in the city, and Rome tries to teach its citizens, as a parent tries to teach his children, what to value in life. Only now we see that Rome teaches two different lessons, in a sense contradictory, in a sense complementary, one to the plebeians (I.i.206–8) involving concern for self-preservation, and one to the patricians (IV.i.4–11) involving scorn for mere life and respect for nobility. Out of these two lessons, and the parties with which they are linked, the Roman Republic seeks to give a balanced representation to the different sides of human nature in the city.