Brandes described Coriolanus as "the tragedy of an inviolably truthful personality in a world of small-minded folk; the tragedy of the punishment a reckless egoism incurs when it is betrayed into setting its own pride above duty to state and fatherland."5 The question of the play's attitude to "state and fatherland" became a matter of intense debate in the first half of the twentieth century. Early in 1934, when the French Socialist government was close to collapse, a new translation of Coriolanus was staged at the Comedie Francaise in Paris. The production was perceived as an attack on democratic institutions. Rioting pro-and anti-government factions clashed in the auditorium. Shakespeare's translator, a Swiss, was branded a foreign Fascist. The prime minister fired the theater director and replaced him with the head of the security police, whose artistic credentials were somewhat questionable. What are we to conclude from this real life drama? That Coriolanus' contempt for the rabble makes Shakespeare himself into a proto-Fascist? How could it then have been that the following year the Maly Theatre company in Stalin's Moscow staged a production of the same play which sought to demonstrate that Coriolanus was an "enemy of the people" and that Shakespeare was therefore a true Socialist? Shakespeare was neither an absolutist nor a democrat, but the fact that both productions were possible is one of the major reasons why he continues to live through his work four centuries after his death.
There is something satisfying in the idea of a Shakespearean performance being condemned one night by fascists castigating it as communist propaganda and the next by communists castigating it as fascist propaganda. Bertolt Brecht, the twentieth-century theater's greatest political polemicist, was notably attracted to the play for precisely this reason. He saw it as his role to remake the drama in the light of contemporary politics. His adaptation of 1951-52 was shaped by his socialism and reacted against previous critics' glorification of the military hero: "He saw in it a drama of the people betrayed by their fascist leader."6 Brecht individualized the citizens, made the tribunes more honorable than Shakespeare's, and turned the people into a united force. They are joined by some of the patricians in the defense of Rome.
The political problems of Coriolanus arise in part from the distance between Coriolanus' interaction with the citizens and his personal status as a specifically Roman hero. Roman concepts of honor and valor, as understood by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ground Coriolanus' character:
Rome is an idea for Coriolanus, the idea of honor, and paradoxically that idea has led him to reject the state which has been its avatar. With increasing painfulness for the audience, Shakespeare explores the implications of this paradox as the play moves toward its bitter end. His honor drives the only honorable man in Rome to treachery, to the betrayal of the state with whom not only his fortunes but also his values are inextricably associated. The process means the destruction of the man.7
The debate over the nature of true "honour" is central to the drama: "Honor is ... [Volumnia's] theme as it is her son's. But we have seen from the beginning that for Volumnia honor is the glory that Rome can confer on its loyal servants, and that honor can therefore employ policy, political expediency."8
Coriolanus' sense of personal honor is that it is a mixture of the inherent and the self-made, whereas some of the other characters and events in the play suggest that heroism is better regarded as a social construct, defined both by action and by society's recognition. "So our virtues / Lie in th'interpretation of the time," says Aufidius at the end of Act 4: "that, in one and a half lines," wrote the critic A. P. Rossiter, "gives the essence of the play. Run over the whole action, act by act, and each is seen as an 'estimate' or valuation of Martius."9
To fulfil his distinction above other men he has to seek dominion over them; but he is bound to fail in this because the distinction is too great; he is too inhuman. Indeed the more godlike he seeks to be, the more inhuman he becomes. The play has very usefully been seen in relation to Aristotle's celebrated dictum: "He that is incapable of living in a society is a god or a beast" ... The ambiguity of Aristotle's remark is nicely adjusted to the ambiguity ... [in the] last tragedies, the moral ambiguity of heroes who are both godlike and inhuman.10
Coriolanus believes himself to be self-sufficient: "As he distrusts words in general and is preoccupied with the private meanings he invests them with, so he distrusts public estimations of himself and is preoccupied with his own inner integrity, his nobility."11
His self-centeredness means that it is hard for the actor playing him to win the sympathy of the audience. The most powerful tool for a Shakespearean tragic character's personal engagement with the spectator is strikingly lacking: "Coriolanus is Shakespeare's least inward tragic hero. He has but one soliloquy"12 (critics actually differ on the number of Coriolanus' soliloquies, depending on editorial and staging choices, but he certainly speaks fewer than three). Coriolanus' inward conflicts are veiled from us: "The change that came when he found himself alone and homeless in exile is not exhibited. The result is partly seen in the one soliloquy of this drama, but the process is hidden."13 Whereas a super-articulate protagonist such as Hamlet is deeply sensitive to tone, verbal nuance, and connotation, for Coriolanus "language is not subject to modification by the requirements of different social situations, not flexible enough to respond in tone and style to the demands of decorum--if it is not a social instrument, neither is it an instrument with which to probe and express the workings of the consciousness."14
Coriolanus' belief in absolutes is his downfall: "The hero's virtue--his passionate sense of honor and allegiance to principles--is also his vice."15 His betrayal "is bound up with his essential and crippling solitariness, and also with his failure ever to consider how much his heroism has truly been dedicated to Rome as a city, and how much to his own self-realization and personal fame."16
The individual character cannot be divorced from his communal context. Integrity is defined in the world of this play not just as truth to self but also as truth to Rome (or to the Volsces). For this reason,
The "tragic flaw" analysis is far too simple. It will never do to say that Coriolanus's calamity is "caused" by his being too proud and unyielding and just that; for one of the play's central paradoxes is that though Caius Martius appears as a "character" almost unvaryingly the same, yet, for all his rigidity, he is pliant, unstable, trustless: traitor to Rome, false to the Volsces, then true to Rome and to home again, and twice traitor to himself.17
In contrast to Coriolanus,
Aufidius is adaptable ... he understands the importance of accommodating one's behaviour to the times. He has also divined (as, for that matter, did the Second Citizen in the opening scene) that his rival is fatally inflexible ... In this judgement, Aufidius is almost, if not entirely, right. Coriolanus in exile is a man haunted by what seems to him the enormity of mutability and change. This is the burden of his soliloquy [in Act 4 Scene 4] ... Only the embassy of women can shatter his convictions, force him into a new way of seeing ... It is, of course, the moment when Coriolanus finally recognizes his common humanity, the strength of love and family ties. But the victory won here is not ... as so often is assumed, that of a private over a public world. Shakespeare is at pains to assert that, in republican Rome, the two are really inseparable. Hence the mute, but important presence of ... Valeria ... [who] is there to represent all the other women of Rome.18
Women are central to this play in a way that they were not in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's earlier tragedy of Roman conduct and politics. "Subject from birth to the relentless pressure of his mother's affection, Coriolanus has grown into a man at once capable of the deepest feeling and unable to give it free expression ... at once a hero, an inexorable fighting machine, and a childishly naive and undeveloped human being."19 Coriolanus' character and heroism are bound by concepts of masculinity that in turn are, paradoxically, reported to have been formed by his mother. Late twentieth-century commentators, especially feminists and psychoanalytically minded readers, reversed the tendency of earl
ier critics to idealize Volumnia, and explored how her vision of maternity and masculinity relates to theories of gender:
Woman, excluded from public life, is devalued save as the bearer of men-children; she must seek her primary emotional satisfaction through her son, who becomes a substitute for her absent husband, the vehicle through which she realizes herself ... In this play, the father is absent and the mother's contribution is exposed and exaggerated.20
The juxtaposition of Volumnia the mother and Virgilia the wife offers a striking contrast:
Volumnia's intense adherence to the masculine code of honor is contrasted to Virgilia's feminine recoil from it. Virgilia fears wounds, blood, and death because they may deprive her of the husband she loves; Volumnia covets them as the signs and seals of honor that make her son a man, and her a man, in effect, through him. Coriolanus in himself does not exist for her; he is only a means for her to realize her own masculine ego ideal, a weapon she fashions for her own triumph.21
Though Volumnia defines herself primarily as a mother, her values are stereotypically "masculine." This paradox allows the post-Freudian critics to have a field day with the play's imagery:
In thinking of the "valiantness" with which she suckled her sons as hers, Volumnia claims to possess the phallus, the prime signifier of masculinity in Rome, but identifies it with a signifier of femininity: mother's milk. Masculinity belongs first to the mother; only she can pass it on to a son. This construction contrasts with one common to many cultures, and certainly prevalent in early modern England: that the male child must be separated from the maternal environment at a certain age, and definitively located in a men's world in order to realize his masculinity.22
A psychoanalytic reading of Coriolanus claims that Coriolanus' strict adherence to masculine strategies is an attempt to separate himself from his mother. Thus for critic Janet Adelman masculinity in Coriolanus is "constructed in response to maternal power." In the absence of a father, "the hero attempts to recreate himself through his bloody heroics, in fantasy severing the connection with his mother even as he enacts the ruthless masculinity that is her bidding":
Thrust prematurely from dependence on his mother, forced to feed himself on his own anger, Coriolanus refuses to acknowledge any neediness or dependency: for his entire sense of himself depends on his being able to see himself as a self-sufficient creature. The desperation behind his claim to self-sufficiency is revealed by his horror of praise.... Coriolanus's battlecry as he storms the gates [of Corioli] sexualizes the scene: "Come on; / If you'll stand fast, we'll beat them to their wives" ... But the dramatic action itself presents the conquest of Corioli as an image not of rape but of triumphant rebirth: after Coriolanus enters the gates of the city, he is proclaimed dead; one of his comrades delivers a eulogy firmly in the past tense ... then Coriolanus miraculously re-emerges, covered with blood ... and is given a new name. For the assault on Corioli is both a rape and a rebirth: the underlying fantasy is that intercourse is a literal return to the womb, from which one is reborn, one's own author. The fantasy of self-authorship is complete when Coriolanus is given his new name, earned by his own actions.23
Concurrently, Coriolanus' escape from Volumnia and the establishment of his masculinity is defined "homosocially," through combat--body contact--with other men. "Cominius reports that Coriolanus entered his first battle a sexually indefinite thing, a boy or an Amazon"; the battlefield is a place where he undergoes a rite of passage into manhood. Psychologically, "The rigid masculinity that Coriolanus finds in war becomes a defense against acknowledgement of his neediness; he nearly succeeds in transforming himself from a vulnerable human creature into a grotesquely invulnerable and isolated thing."24
For Stanley Cavell, "Coriolanus's erotic attachment to battle and to men who battle suggest a search for the father as much as an escape from the mother."25 Whether Coriolanus is in search of a father or a lover, there is no doubt that his relationship with Aufidius is charged with the electricity of desire.
The dominance of Volumnia's maternal presence is highlighted by the language of the play: "The imagery of food and eating is perhaps the most extensive and important motif in the play. It calls attention to the appetitive nature of the plebeians, while the negative (images of temperance and austerity) represents an heroic aristocratic ideal."26 Key speeches such as Menenius' fable of the belly in the opening scene repay close attention to the language of digestion employed:
The wording of the [belly] parable tends to the transformation of a political commonplace, a theoretical vindication of natural "degree," into a criticism, not of this attitude or that, but of Roman society itself. The impression of a general obstruction of all vital activity communicates itself through the unhealthy stagnation of "idle and unactive," the coarseness of "cupboarding." These effects are set against the very noticeable livening of the verse when Menenius turns to the "other instruments," the senses and active faculties of the body which represent, however, not the class he is defending but its enemies. These contrasted elements, thus concentrated, in a manner profoundly typical of the play, upon images of food and digestion, answer to the real state of the Roman polity. Stagnation and mutual distrust, mirroring the ruthlessness of contrary appetites for power, are the principal images by which we are introduced to the public issues of Coriolanus.27
Related to the images of food and the body are those of disease, as when Coriolanus describes the citizens as a pestilence, an infection that endangers the body politic. The tragic irony of his fate is that Rome comes to regard him as the plague that must be driven out. The disease imagery is turned against him: "By a reversal of roles he, and not the plebeians, is now the 'infection,' and the Tribunes have become physicians to the body politic."28 So it is that "Coriolanus' death is at the same time tragic and ironic. It is tragic in the world created by Coriolanus; tragic according to his mad and absolute system of values. It is ironic in the real world."29
There is none of the sense of transcendence that occurs at the end of Antony and Cleopatra, nor any of the grim satisfaction of poetic justice which greets the end of the tyrant Macbeth. At the close, all that can be properly said is, in the words of an anonymous Volscian Lord, "Let's make the best of it."
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).
Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format "Quartos" published in Shakespeare's lifetime and the elaborately produced "First Folio" text of 1623, the original "Complete Works" prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Coriolanus exists only in a Folio text that is generally well printed. Its full, "literary" stage directions and spelling preferences suggest it was set from Shakespeare's authorial papers. The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Coriolanus, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus "Caius MARTIUS, later CORIOLANUS").
Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which Co
riolanus is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations ("another part of the city"). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Coriolanus the action is divided between the city of Rome and the opposing cities (Corioles and Antium) or camps of the Volscians.
Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King's Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare's fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.