Coriolanus
Handout #8
English 231/231W
Spring 2008
Synopsis:
The setting is ancient Italy in the years before the rise of the Roman Empire. The citizens
of Rome are disgruntled and mistrustful of the patrician Senate. Marcius holds the rabble
in contempt, for the most part, and draws the ire of the plebes by calling them cowards.
However, Marcius is Rome's best general, and when the neighboring Volscians wage war
upon Rome, Marcius takes their capital, Corioli, single-handedly. In honor of his
accomplishment he is given the new name of Coriolanus; Tullus Aufidius, the Volscian
general, vows to avenge the defeat.
Coriolanus is given a great welcome back in Rome for his victory, and the Senate wishes
to make him a consul. However, he must have popular support to be elected to this
position, and two tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius, conspire to reverse the plebes' opinion on
him. In turn, Coriolanus denounces the tribunes, even saying that the office itself should
be abolished. Volumnia, his mother, attempts to soothe him, but when confronted with
the tribunes in front of the people, their insults and accusations are too much for the
proud warrior. His temper earns him banishment. Coriolanus angrily travels to Antium.
There Coriolanus meets with Aufidius. He offers himself as a war leader, for Aufidius
either to accept or to slay. Aufidius grants him the leadership of half the Volscian army.
Though Aufidius chafes under Coriolanus's arrogance, the two generals invade Roman
territory, advancing to the very gates of Rome itself. All of Coriolanus's previous friends
and allies try to reason with him; however, it takes Volumnia to convince him to
negotiate for peace. When Coriolanus returns to the Volscians, he explains that Rome
will not be conquered—only to be dragged before the Volscian senators, accused of
treason by Aufidius, and unceremoniously stabbed to death.
CITY OF IN-GRATIA: ROMAN INGRATITUDE IN
SHAKESPEARE'S CORIOLANUS
By Peter J Leithart
(Literature & Theology: December 2006)
A woman once requested that H. L. Mencken examine and critique two novels she had
written. Mencken protested, then relented under a barrage of flattery, and found the
manuscripts 'wholly without merit-in fact, the veriest twaddle'. He wrote as much to the
author, and was initially surprised when she never expressed her gratitude for his time
and effort. On reflection, Mencken concluded that her failure to respond was 'not
discreditable to her, but highly creditable', demonstrating 'a certain human dignity,
despite her imbecile writings'. Gratitude, Mencken concluded, is always a confession of
inferiority, which is 'degrading to the confessor' and embarrassing to the recipient of the
confession. Altruists and philanthropes fish for gratitude and attempt 'to get fuel for [their
vanity] in the cheapest way', and the grateful man is 'essentially third rate' and 'is
conscious of it at the bottom of his heart'. Anyone who possesses an accurate knowledge
of his gifts and limitations will avoid both giving favours and thanks: 'He hesitates to
demonstrate his superiority by such banal means, and he shrinks from confessing an
inferiority that he doesn't believe in'. The ungrateful and incompetent authoress at least
demonstrated 'the great instinctive sapience of her sex', her liberty from the 'nonsensical
delusions, vanities, conventions and moralities of men'.2
I . GRATITUDE AND POLITICS
Mencken aside, one is hard-pressed to find a writer willing to praise ingratitude in
public.3 Aristotle, to be sure, was lukewarm regarding gratitude. Though he considered it
virtuous to make a return on a gift,4 he endorsed gratitude mainly because returning a
favour enabled the magnanimous man to escape the inferiority of indebtness, and he saw
no vice in the tendency to remember benefits conferred more than benefits received.5 By
and large, however, ancient, medieval and early modern moralists condemned ingratitude
in the most severe terms. Renaissance writers frequently cited Xenophon's account of
ancient Persia's severity towards ingratitude,6 and Seneca's De Beneficiis, the most
extensive treatment of giving and gratitude from the Roman world, was translated into
English by Arthur Golding (1578) and Thomas Lodge (1614).7 It was a Renaissance
truism that ingratitude was irrational, monstrous, unnatural and unjust, a vice and a fount
of further evils, which could only lead to murder, theft, adultery, robbery, resentment and
vengeance.8
For both the ancients and the Renaissance writers influenced by them, ingratitude was not
merely morally reprehensible, but socially destructive. 'Concordia' or friendship was seen
as 'commodius to the weale-publicke', 'the nursing mother of humane societie, the
preseruer of states and politics',9 and thankfulness was in turn essential to the
preservation of Concordia. Benefits and gratitude for benefits were seen as the stuff of
social bonds. Conversely, nothing, according to Arthur Golding's translation of Seneca,
'dooth so much vnknit and plucke asunder the concorde of mankynd' as ingratitude,10
and ingratitude was seen as the solvent of bonds between 'children and the father,
betweene brethren, kinsfolks & friends'.11
Ingratitude was often seen as a political evil as well. Political gratitude functions at
various levels-binding the present generation to the past, the rulers to the ruled, citizens to
one another-and thus ingratitude was recognised as a threat to the foundations of political
life. And, since humanity is fulfilled in political community, ingratitude was seen as an
assault on flourishing human life. In the Crito, Socrates explains his refusal to oppose his
death sentence by reminding Crito of the debt he owes Athens for his birth and education.
Socrates can no more strike back against the nomoi from which he received life and
education than he can strike against a mother who disciplines him. Early modern writers
also explored the political effects of gratitude and ingratitude. Thomas Elyot included a
section on ingratitude in his manual of instruction for princes,12 Machiavelli raised
ingratitude as a political problem in the first book of his Discourses,13 Nahum Tate's
1682 dramatisation of the Coriolanus story was entitled 'The Ingratitude of a CommonWealth',14 and, most interestingly, Nicholas Breton charged that ingratitude turns men
into 'Machauilian fiends'.15 Ingratitude is analogous to treason,16 and is itself an act of
treason and a source of revolt.17 Ingratitude is the vice common to the tyrant and the
traitor.18
Over the past decade and a half, political theorists and ethicists such as A. D. M. Walker,
Terrance McConnell, George Klosko and others have debated whether gratitude provides
grounds for political obligation.19 Yet, the drift of much modern political thought runs
against the ancient and early modern instinct that the benefit-gratitude nexus binds
society and politics.20 In modern economic and social thought, gratitude is confined
within a private sphere of friendship and family, mollifying the effects of competitive
self-interest but playing no significant role in public life.21 In political theory, a bright
line is drawn between private debts of gratitude and the differently grounded obligations
of political life.22 Recent social contract theorists are even more extreme than previous
generations in their elision of gratitude: behind the veil of ignorance, after all, one cannot
know what to be grateful for or to whom. No one will deny that politics is permeated with
paybacks, but few defend gratitude as a high political motive or as an essential ingredient
of political health.23
This article is a small contribution to the rehabilitation of gratitude as a political virtue. I
approach this by summarising the dramatisation of political gratitude-or, more accurately,
political ingratitude-in Shakespeare. Following Clifford Ronan's suggestion that gratitude
and ingratitude loom larger in Shakespeare's classical plays than elsewhere, I have
focused attention on one of his Roman plays, Coriolanus.24 Recent Shakespeare
scholarship has emphasised not only his political interests (which have long been
recognised), but, also the theological setting in which those political interests developed.
Debora Shuger writes, 'if it is not plausible to read Shakespeare's plays as Christian
allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously saturated culture
could, by a secular miracle, have extricated itself from the theocentric orientation
informing the discourses of politics, gender, social order and history'.25 In his 2002
Shakespeare's Tribe, Jeffrey Knapp argues that scholars do not go far enough. While they
stress 'the centrality of religion to the study of Renaissance drama', they accept part of the
secular theatre thesis they are opposing since they assume that 'Renaissance playwrights
[are] "Christian" only cognitively or subliminally, rather than purposively and
devotionally'. Thus, not even recent revisionist scholarship 'allows the possibility that
Renaissance plays may have been intended and received as contributions to the cause of
true religion', nor have they considered the possibility that 'Shakespeare and his
contemporaries were capable of envisaging their profession itself-their acting and
playwrighting-as a kind of ministry'. For his part, Knapp argues that
English theology and ecclesiology shaped the drama at a fundamental level, in helping to
determine the conceptualization of the player and the playwright as professions, and of
the theater as an institution; these self-images in turn disposed theater people toward the
enacting of certain confirmatory plots, themes, and characters on stage; and thus religion
had a crucial say in the creation of plays, in their content, and, by extension, in their
presumed social effects.26
In short, 'religion had a more direct role in the production of plays than as the deep
structure of dramatised ideology; it provided the rationale and even motives for acting
and playwrighting'.27
Along similar lines, Julia Reinhard Lupton argues that Shakespeare's dramas
stage the sacramental marriage, civil divorce, and dangerous liaisons between politics and
religion in the West, probing the intersection between the founding metaphors of diving
sovereignty and modern forms of social organization based on the economic contracts of
individuals. Shakespeare's plays, I suggest, are preoccupied by the strange cohabitation of
the saint and the citizen . . ..28
Shakespeare's theological interests cannot be gainsaid, and add an important theological
dimension to his dramatic explorations of political gratitude.
In the light of this suggestion, it is not inappropriate to find the initial parameters of the
discussion in Aquinas, who provides a succinct discussion of gratitude (ST II ii, 107, 2)
that will serve as a framework for my examination of Shakespeare.29 Aquinas details
three features of gratitude, and conversely of ingratitude:
The first of these is to recognize the favor received, the second to express one's
appreciation and thanks, and the third to repay the favor at a suitable place and time
according to one's means. And since what is last in the order of generation is first in the
order of destruction, it follows that the first degree of ingratitude is when a man fails to
repay a favor, the second when he declines to notice or indicate that he has received a
favor, while the third and supreme degree is when a man fails to recognize the reception
of a favor, whether by forgetting it or in any other way. Moreover, since opposite
affirmation includes negation, it follows that it belongs to the first degree of ingratitude to
return evil for good, to the second to find fault with a favor received, and to the third to
esteem kindness as though it were unkindness.
For Aquinas, gratitude is not a purely psychological reality, but necessarily comes to
expression ('thanks') and creates a debt that ought to be repaid, though the form and
timing of the repayment varies. In a political setting, these features take on a somewhat
different colouration, but Aquinas' triad is still workable. A populace is grateful to its
rulers, for instance, when it acknowledges the benefits it receives from its government,
when it gives public expression of thanks (which could take a variety of forms, from
voting to patriotic celebrations) and when it repays those benefits (by, among other
things, obeying laws and maintaining order). Shakespeare's ungrateful political figures
fail at each of these three points-they fail to acknowledge the receipt of benefits, to
express thanks and to repay for the benefits received.
Aquinas also argues (ST II ii, 106, 6) that repayment of debts of gratitude should tend to
exceed the original benefit:
gratitude regards the favor received according the intention of the benefactor; who seems
be deserving of praise, chiefly for having conferred the favor gratis without being bound
to do so. Wherefore the beneficiary is under a moral obligation to bestow something
gratis in return. Now he does not seem to bestow something gratis, unless he exceeds the
quantity of the favor received: because so long as he repays less or an equivalent, he
would seem to do nothing gratis, but only to return what he has received. Therefore
gratitude always inclines, as far as possible, to pay back something more.
Grace is the appropriate repayment for the grace received. While a gift imposes a moral
obligation to make return, that obligation is best discharged in a way that highlights its
gratuitous character. Though this tendency of gratitude to exceed the initial benefit is
difficult to envision politically (how do citizens repay a general for saving their
civilization from destruction?), it is at least clear that Aquinas does not view arithmetic
equality of gratitude as a good.30 As we shall see, Shakespeare's Coriolanus dramatises
the conflict between a politics founded on cost-benefit calculations and a political
economy of gratuity.31
II. CORIOLANUS, GRATITUDE AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY32
Uncannily contemporary, Coriolanus is replete with the stuff of day-to-day political life:
handlers, plots, propaganda, demagoguery, street riots, restive mobs, corrupt
electioneering and manipulations on all sides, all set against the background of a
constitutional crisis and famine.33 But the play has often been read and produced as a
dramatisation of political ideology as well, though the particular ideology represented by
the play has varied wildly across the political spectrum. A production at Drury Lane in
1789 embodied the strongly anti-Jacobin politics of its producer John Philip Kemble,
idealising the patrician characters and representing the plebs, in R. B. Parker's words, as
'clownish, ineffectual dolts'. Nazis produced the play during the 1930s to expose the evils
of democracy and to celebrate Hitler as a conqueror greater than the Roman Martius
(Coriolanus). So powerful was the play's resonance with Nazis that it was banned in the
first years of postwar Allied occupation. On the other hand, many productions offer
leftish interpretations that highlight the distasteful pride of Coriolanus and present the
tribunes as champions of democracy. Eastern European productions during the 1930s
turned the plebs and tribunes into heroes and the condemned Martius as a tyrant, while
Bertold Brecht's unfinished adaptation thoroughly reinvented the story. In Brecht's
version, instead of being fearful and demoralised by Martius' attack on Rome, the
tribunes organise the plebs into a defence force so powerful that Martius withdraws of his
own accord.34
Left and right seem to have equal claim to the play,35 which suggests that Shakespeare's
political interest lies elsewhere, and I wish of course to suggest that his interest lies in the
political import of gratitude and especially ingratitude.36 At a first reading or viewing,
the whole play unfolds against the backdrop of the parable of the stomach, told to the
assembled plebs by the patrician Menenius in the first scene.37 All the organs of the body
rebel against the stomach because, though 'idle and inactive', it gets the first share of
food. Deliberately and gravely and 'with a kind of smile', the stomach explains,
True it is . . .
That I receive the general food at first . . .
But, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive their natural competency
Whereby they live. (1.1.134-146)38
Menenius' is a vision of a 'mutually participate' social body, bound together by mutual
benefit and assistance. Instead of enviously and ungratefully complaining against the
patricians, the plebs ought, Menenius thinks, to recognise that their lives depend on the
stomach of the Senate and that they are protected against the barbarous Volscians
principally by the despised Martius. Menenius' parable initially seems to serve as an ideal
by which the real Rome is measured, though ultimately we shall see that it has a more
disturbing message.39
a. Ungrateful Rome
That Rome fails to live up to this ideal is evident in many ways, not least in the repeated
references to body parts that litter the play.40 But why? What causes the dismemberment
of the Roman body politic? From one perspective, the play might be seen as a
straightforward dramatisation of the Menenius' fable, as it depicts the failure of the limbs
to return gratitude for the stomach's benefits, the Roman populace's forgetful ingratitude
for the service of her benefactor and protector(s). At the beginning of Act 2, scene 2, an
officer discussing Coriolanus' campaign for consul tells a fellow officer that Coriolanus'
military accomplishments 'deserved worthily of his country' and says that 'for [the plebs']
tongues to be silent and not confess so much were a kind of ingrateful injury'. They owe
their voices/votes to Martius for the past services rendered. In the following scene, the
'Third Citizen' offers a similar opinion:
if he tell us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our noble acceptances of them.
Ingratitude is monstrous, and for the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of
the multitude - of the which we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous
members. (2.3.8-14)
To be a 'monster' means, in Shakespeare's terminology, to be unnatural. A literal monster
does not share the nature of his parents, and metaphorically a monster renounces the
common nature that he shares with others.41 When the multitude fails to acknowledge
Martius' contributions to Rome's prosperity and safety, Rome denies the nature that she
shares with her civic 'parent', and becomes monstrous.42
This speech opens two critical scenes in which Coriolanus seeks and appears to win the
favour of the plebs, only to see his election seized from him through the machinations of
the tribunes, who deftly exploit Martius' own flaws. Martius' campaign and its ultimate
failure turn on the question of gratitude.43 He asks for the 'voices' of the people by
speaking of the battle wounds that serve as memorial tokens of his service to the city.
These tokens, he expects, will stimulate the memory of the plebs, who will thereby be
stirred to support him in his run for the consulate. The tribunes, however, evoke
remembrances of Coriolanus' contempt for the plebs (2.3.246-251), and this alternative
recollection turns the populace from gratitude to hatred. Soon, prompted by the tribunes,
they are calling for his banishment. When the tribunes describe Coriolanus as a disease,
infection, poison and gangrene that must be excised from the body of Rome, Coriolanus
charges that the officers' fears have come true: Rome is a monster, a 'Hydra' for whom the
tribunes serve as 'horn and noise of the monster's' (3.1.92, 94). Unkindness/ingratitude
has turned the plebs at least into a thing unnatural, not of humankind.
In other plays, monstrous ingratitude turns cannibalistic,44 and so it is for Coriolanus as
well:45
MENENIUS
The augurer tells me we shall have news to-night.
BRUTUS
Good or bad?
MENENIUS
Not according to the prayer of the people, for they love not Martius.
SICINIUS
Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.
MENENIUS
Pray you, who does the wolf love?
SICINIUS
The lamb.
MENENIUS
Ay, to devour him; as the hungry plebeians would the noble Martius.
BRUTUS
He's a lamb indeed, that baes like a bear.
MENENIUS
He' a bear indeed, that lives like a lamb. (2.1.1-12)
After the tribunes' plot has trapped Martius, Menenius prays that Rome would not be
transformed into a cannibal mother:
Now the good gods forbid
That our renowned Rome, whose gratitude
Towards her deserved children is enroll'd
In Jove's own book, like an unnatural dam
Should now eat up her own! (3.1.288-292)
Coriolanus will not abide the insult, and in his mind the ingratitude of Rome has
dissolved his bonds to Rome so completely that nothing obliges him any longer to serve
the city that gave him birth. Rather than endure contempt, injury and exile, he plans
revenge, and at the urging of the Volscian commander Aufidius, determines to 'pour
war/Into the bowels of ungrateful Rome' (4.5.131-132). Ultimately, the patricians join the
plebs in forgetful ingratitude (4.6.122f.), and Coriolanus despises them even more deeply
than the plebs, rejecting both his commander Cominius and his surrogate father,
Menenius, who appeal to him to abandon his assault on Rome. Rome chews up her hero
and spits him into exile. Rome fails at every point of Aquinas' account of gratitude: they
forget the benefits they owe to Martius' heroism, express hatred rather than thanks, and
do not support him in grateful repayment for his contributions to Rome.
On this rendering of the story, Martius ultimately decides that the injury has not, after all,
broken all bonds of obligation, and his capitulation to his mother's pleas can be seen as
his reluctant submission to the rules of benefit exchange. Seneca explores the relation of
benefit and injury at length, since injury is the opposite of benefit. In Book 6 of his
treatise, he explicitly raises the question of whether a benefit may be cancelled by an
injury (6.5). His ultimate conclusion depends on his distinction between the benefit per se
and 'what any of us receive through a benefit' (6.2):
The benefit itself is incorporeal, and never becomes invalid; but its subject-matter
changes owners, and passes from hand to hand. So, when you take away from anyone
what you have given him, you take away the subject-matter only of the benefit, not the
benefit itself. Nature herself cannot recall what she has given. She may cease to bestow
benefits, but cannot take them away: a man who dies, yet has lived; a man who becomes
blind, nevertheless has seen. She can cut off her blessings from us in the future, but she
cannot prevent our having enjoyed them in the past. We are frequently not able to enjoy a
benefit for long, but the benefit is not thereby destroyed. Let Nature struggle as hard as
she please, she cannot give herself retrospective action. A man may lose his house, his
money, his property- everything to which the name of benefit can be given-yet the benefit
itself will remain firm and unmoved; no power can prevent his benefactor's having
bestowed them, or his having received them. (De Beneficiis, 6.2)
Though Rome has ungratefully injured him, Martius ultimately ignores the injury, turns
the other cheek, acknowledges his mother's claims and withdraws from Rome.
Coriolanus returns to the bond of gratitude, in spite of what it will cost him. Rome is
saved in spite of her ingratitude, and Coriolanus is torn to pieces by the Volscians, a
scapegoat suffering outside the camp for the salvation of the city that rejected him.46
Rome has become the unnatural dam that devours her best son.
b. Ungrateful Martius
This story of Roman ingratitude towards Coriolanus is crossed by the story of Coriolanus'
ingratitude towards Rome, and it is in the latter storyline that the more interesting
political insights arise.47 From early in Shakespeare's play, Coriolanus' adherence to the
code of benefit and gratitude is, to put it mildly, open to question. Curiously, Martius'
first word in the play is 'Thanks' (1.1.162), yet he immediately begins to chide the plebs
assembled in the public square as 'dissentious rogues' who have nothing better to do than
to rub 'the poor itch of your opinion' so as to produce 'scabs' (1.1.162-164). His
expression of gratitude is immediately subverted by harsh attacks on the people.
Coriolanus, further, refuses to receive benefits, which, while not technically ingratitude,
signifies his rejection of the rules of benefit and return.48 When his general Cominius
commends his action at Corioli, Coriolanus complains that he cannot bear to be praised.
Vickers sees this as commendable humility, evidence that Martius is neither proud nor
ambitious,49 but Cominius sees cruelty and ingratitude lurking beneath the apparent
humility: 'Too modest are you,/More cruel to your good report than grateful/To us that
give you truly' (1.9.52-54).50 At the end of the scene, Martius reports that a poor man of
Corioles 'used me kindly' (1.9.82), but he cannot even remember the man's name so that
he can be repaid (1.9.89-91). Wallace accurately suggests that Coriolanus takes
Aristotle's magnanimous man, rather than Seneca's grateful man, as his model. Like
Aristotle's ideal, Coriolanus remembers benefits conferred, and expects others to
remember them, but is indifferent to or forgets benefits received.51 He is following part
of Aquinas' sequence of ingratitude: forgetful of a favour received, he also treats the
kindness of Cominius as an unkindness.
Mencken would be proud: Martius has an aversion to dependence and the admission of
inferiority that it involves, an aversion utterly consistent with both his outlook on Rome
and his military tactics. A one-man army, he takes the city of Corioles without assistance,
and later is able to boast 'Alone I did it' (5.6.115).52 As Jagendorf points out, he thinks of
himself not as a limb or organ of Rome but as a whole, isolated body to himself, and it is
fitting that he is named after the city that he conquered: 'La ville c'est moi'.53 Even when
he moves from war to politics, he remains a one-man show. To insert gratitude between
the deeds and its reward is to insert the plebs, and Martius is repulsed by his reliance on
their voices. He longs for a world in which there is no mediating populace between
accomplishment and reward, where deeds are their own reward, where heroic honour can
wriggle free of the community that valourizes it. Before the tribunes turn the people of
Rome against him, he has already separated himself from the body, preferring a kind of
individualistic state of nature, acknowledging only those obligations that he chooses to
acknowledge.
Intriguingly, though he scorns putting his wounds and deeds into the marketplace, he
regularly employs the commercial language of merit, desert and wages to describe the
political value of his military successes. 'I pray, your price o' th' consulship' (2.3.72-73),
he says, to which the First Citizen replies that the price is to ask 'kindly' (2.3.74).
Provoked by the tributes, he castigates the plebs as cowards, insisting that their
'service/did not deserve corn gratis' (3.1.123-124). Evidently, Martius thinks of his own
social bond with Rome, and Rome's obligation to the populace, as a matter of contract,54
and he does not believe the plebs have fulfilled their end of the bargain. Rome certainly
has no obligation to repay the plebs in excess of their contribution to Roman life, and
when the plebs refuse to pay the respect they owe him, the contract becomes null and
void. But his isolation is more radical still, for he not only renounces the economy of
benefit and gratuity, but hesitates even to bring himself into the realm of exchange,
whether economical or political. He acts as if he is a natural man liberated from the
obligation of return because he has refused to accept. He turns his back on the city,
declaring that 'there is a world elsewhere' (3.3.134-135), and he ultimately utters an
extreme statement of consensual social contract: 'I banish you' (3.3.124).55
Martius' desire to escape the round of gift and return gift is a sign of his inhumanity. At a
number of points in the play, he, not the ungrateful multitude, is described as that
paradigmatically isolated of all unkind and unnatural monsters, the dragon:
Believe't not lightly-though I go alone,
Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen
Makes fear'd and talk'd of more than seen-your son
Will or exceed the common or be caught
With cautelous baits and practice. (4.1.30ff.)
he bears all things fairly.
And shows good husbandry for the Volscian state,
Fights dragon-like, and does achieve as soon
As draw his sword; yet he hath left undone
That which shall break his neck or hazard mine,
Whene'er we come to our account. (4.7.23ff.)
There is difference between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub. This
Marcius is grown from man to dragon: he has wings; he's more than a creeping thing.
(5.4.9ff.)
Even when he is serving the city, he is more a 'thing' rather than a man, standing as he
does outside the social compact of gift and exchange. Rome's ingratitude made her
cannibalistic; and Coriolanus responds with a similarly monstrous appetite to consume
Rome.56 Contrary to his fantasies, his titles and rewards do not rest only on his
achievements on the field, but precisely on the grateful response of those who recognise
his deeds. All he is depends on his participation in Roman society, and in particular
depends on his inheritance of position, status and title from his parents. Detached from
the compact of gratitude that binds generations, he is without name, without class and
without title. Isolated from the political community of Rome, he becomes 'kind of
nothing, titleless' (5.1.13).
The inhumanity of his position is especially evident in the internal soliloquies as he waits
for Volumnia's arrival in the Volscian camp. He intends to resist the instinct to honour his
mother and city:
My wife comes foremost; then the honour'd mould
Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand
The grandchild to her blood. But, out, affection!
All bond and privilege of nature, break!
Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.
What is that curt'sy worth? or those doves' eyes,
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows;
As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod: and my young boy
Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great nature cries "Deny not." let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy: I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand,
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin. (5.3.22-37)
This is his dream: to be godlike, self-authored, without obligation to city or family.
Renouncing kin, he becomes unkind.
When Volumnia arrives, she cajoles and manipulates him back to his obligations, and her
victory is not merely a return to filial obligation. From her first appearance in the play,
Volumnia has functioned as a personification of Rome.57 She pushed him into combat,
and urged him on to seek honour on the battlefield:
When yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb, when youth with
comeliness plucked all gaze his way, when for a day of kings' entreaties a mother should
not sell him an hour from her beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a
person, that it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not
stir, was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I
sent him; from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I
sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had
proved himself a man. (1.3.5-17)
She is the source of his valour, and the model of his contempt for the plebs. He drank all
that he is from her breasts. To tread on Rome is to tread on the womb that gave him birth
(5.3.120-125).
Against this background, Volumnia's triumph over her son is a political as well as a
familial victory, and Coriolanus' renewed recognition of the obligations he owes
Volumnia is simultaneously a renewed recognition of his obligations to Rome. Time,
history, heritage, mother and Mother-city reassert their claims, and Coriolanus'
experiment in (un)natural individualism and independent freedom collapses.58 But it is
too late for him to be restored to the economy of gratuity. While his mother returns to the
city in a triumphal procession like those that Martius once enjoyed, Martius returns to
Aufidius, and to the twenty-nine wounds he has received in battle, he adds the
innumerable wounds inflicted by the Volscians in the marketplace of Corioli, where he is
again the sole Roman in the city.59
On this interpretation, the play traces Coriolanus' development from elevated
magnanimous man, through the renunciation of obligations of gratitude that takes him
close to a purely contractual understanding of his place in Roman political order, to a
revival of political gratitude towards his M(m)other, the Womb/Rome that gave him
birth. For Shakespeare, Coriolanus not only serves as a parable of the evils of collective
and individual ingratitude, but ultimately points to obligations deeper than consent. Rome
is hardly free of political evils at the play's end. Martius saves Rome by his death, but he
leaves behind a Rome infested with tribunes who manipulate the people for their own
ends. Rome languishes still under the regime of 'divided worship'. But in that long silence
when Martius reaches for his mother's hand, Shakespeare vindicates the fundamental
premise of Menenius' parable, for his independent and isolated hero discovers that his
consent does not exhaust his responsibility, that there is some deep, mysterious root for
the compact of gratitude that binds city and citizen, past and present, Mother and son.60
c. Outside Gratia
This second line of interpretation gets closer to Shakespeare's politics in this play, but
there is a deeper dimension still to the dramatisation of Roman ingratitude. At the risk of
conflating Shakespeare and Augustine, Will and the great theologian of will, we might
venture one further step: there are hints that, for Shakespeare, Rome was cannibalistic not
only when deformed by ingratitude, but in its essence-or, rather, that ingratitude was its
constituting reality rather than a result of a defection. It not only becomes, but is from its
foundation, the 'unnatural dam', the cannibalistic mother, just as it did not become
fratricidally divided but was founded on fratricide. From this angle, Menenius' parable
takes on a darker colouration, for it depicts the central reality of Rome as a belly-womb
that devours her children. As Augustine knew, Rome is the city of Cain from its
beginnings, the city of Volumnia, that most Roman of mothers, who shows a disturbingly
voluptuous interest in her son's wounds.
Rome, thus, fundamentally distorts the economy of gratitude that characterises a
genuinely participative society. Because its highest good is the pursuit of valour,
especially military valour,61 Rome cannot help but pervert the exchange of benefits. Like
Volumnia (or Lear), Rome is not content with a moderate and qualified gratitude. She
claims to have given all to her sons, and in return demands all, demanded especially the
immolation of her sons. The moment Martius' affections return to Rome, he is called to
die. As Gail Kern Paster says,
Shakespeare cannot deprive Rome of its central importance. It is worth saving because
the city as mother is the source of nurture, training, and ideals, the achievement of
common humanity, and the seat of the heart's affections, which it is impious, unnatural,
and perhaps impossible to deny. For all its ties to the higher order of ideals and
aspirations, though, the city is also died to the natural world. . . . Like other aspects of
nature, the need of the city to maintain its physical integrity demands the sacrifice of its
best and most characteristic product - the hero. Coriolanus's decision to spare Rome and
die - in a way, to starve with feeding - reveals the community to be in truth the mother
who eats her children.62
For her benefits to her children, devouring Rome demands a 'grateful' response in the
form of self-sacrifice. The fundamental tragedy of the play is not the ingratitude of the
plebs nor of Coriolanus, but Rome's tragic failure to establish an economy of gratitude.
Rome, it seems, is not a body, but an all-consuming stomach; Rome is the cannibal
Mother-City, the citizens mere food for a smiling belly, a belly that smiles gravely.
From this angle, Coriolanus offers a deeper challenge to contemporary political life, and
to political life as such, than either rightist or leftist interpretations recognise. The play
questions whether a political order can survive when discontent and complaint, suspicion
and forgetfulness, shape public discourse and political life. And the play forces us to ask
whether or how a regime founded on benefit and gratitude can avoid deteriorating into a
regime of maternal cannibalism. Shakespeare gestures cryptically from the Roman city of
man towards another city, dramatising one half of the Augustinian insight that
deterioration to civic cannibalism is only avoidable within the realm of gratia, which is
the realm of genuine gratitude.
REFERENCES
1 My thanks to the thoughtful reactions of my colleagues at New St. Andrews College
who interacted with an earlier version of this article in a Faculty Forum, 24 August 2005.
This article was also presented to the Society of Catholic Social Scientists at the
American Political Science Association convention, 3 September 2005. I am grateful for
the insights offered by the respondent, Prof. Carson Holloway of the University of
Nebraska at Omaha.
2 'Scientific Examination of a Popular Virtue', Prejudices (second series; New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), pp. 172-9. Long before the world was awakened by Derrida,
Mencken was busy deconstructing the gift.
3 Salvador Dali provides another, vulgar, illustration. Withdrawing during intercourse
one night, he ejaculated into an envelope, which he sent to his father with the label, 'Debt
paid in full'.
4 Nicomachean Ethics, 9.1.
5 Nicomachean Ethics, 4.3.
6 Catherine Dunn, The Concept of Ingratitude in Renaissance English Moral Philosophy
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1946), pp. 3-8.
7 Ibid., p. 9.
8 Ibid., p. 10.
9 Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome, English translation 1608; cited in ibid., p. 26.
10 Cited in ibid., pp. 28-29.
11 Peter de la Primaudaye, The French Academie (1594), cited in ibid., p. 29.
12 Boke Named the Gouvernour (Menston, England: Scolar Press [1531] 1970), Book 2,
Chapter 13.
13 Discourses, 1.28-32.
14 N. Tate, The Ingratitude of A Common-Wealth (London: Cornmarket Press, [1682]
fasc. 1969).
15 'A True Description of Unthankfulnesse', cited in Dunn, Ingratitude, p. 15.
16 'For like as treason is no other thing than a breach of faith and dutie; euen so
ingratitude is no other thing, than a breach of the band and dutie due vnto a man, by
reason of a pleasure receiued' (Remigio Nannini, Civill Considerations upon Many and
Sundrie Histories [1601], cited in Dunn, Ingratitude, p. 47).
17 William Bullein compares the ingratitude of Judas to 'all Traitours agaynste Prynces,
by whome they haue receiued Benefites' (The Bulwarke of Defense against All Sicknesse
[1579], cited in Dunn, Ingratitude, p. 48), and Robert Dallington describes the defection
of two Italian vassals from the king of France as an act of 'vngratefull reuolt, from so
magnificent a Prince' (Aphorismes Civill and Militarie [1629], cited in ibid., p. 49).
18 Joseph William Hewitt, 'Some Aspects of the Treatment of Ingratitude in Greek and
English Literature', Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological
Association 48 (1917) 42-7.
19 A. D. M. Walker, 'Political Obligation and the Argument from Gratitude', Philosophy
and Public Affairs 17 (1988); George Klosko, 'Political Obligation and Gratitude',
Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989) 352-8. Walker responded to Klosko in the same
issue of that journal in an article entitled 'Obligations of Gratitude and Political
Obligations'. See also Klosko, 'Four Arguments Against Political Obligations from
Gratitude', Public Affairs Quarterly 5 (1991); Christopher Heath Wellman, 'Gratitude and
Political Obligation', APA Newsletters: Newsletter on Philosophy and Law 99 (1999);
Terrance McConnell, Gratitude (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 180208. See also the seminal discussion in Georg Simmel, 'Faithfulness and Gratitude', in
Kurt Wolff, trans. and ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press,
1950); and William F. Buckley, Jr, Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe To Our
Country (New York: Random House, 1990), which, although it is mainly a book of
policy advocacy, begins with insightful theoretical reflections on the political duty of
gratitude.
20 It would surely be an overstatement to claim that gratitude and ingratitude disappeared
from consideration. Adam Smith has a great deal to say about gratitude in A Theory of
Moral Sentiments, for instance. Yet, despite his attention to gratitude, Smith distinguishes
debts of gratitude from both economic exchange and from justice, rather than subsuming
gratitude under justice, as Aquinas had done. See Eun Kyung Min, 'Adam Smith and the
Debt of Gratitude', in Mark Osteen, ed., The Question of the Gift (London: Routledge,
2002).
21 See Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, eds. The Psychology of
Gratitude (Oxford: OUP, 2004). Emmons and McCullough are co-directors of a research
project on gratitude and thankfulness, but they are pursuing this research under the vapid
heading of 'happiness studies' and among their findings are: 'In a sample of adults with
neuromuscular disease, a 21-day gratitude intervention resulted in greater amounts of
high energy positive moods, a greater sense of feeling connected to others, more
optimistic ratings of one's life, and better sleep duration and sleep quality, relative to a
control group' (http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons/).
22 As Gary Glenn has pointed out, Bellarmine (and Burke more explicitly) viewed
gratitude as the obligatory response to the gifts of previous generations and hence the
bond of a kind of intergenerational social compact. By contrast, 'gratitude' appears in
Locke's Two Treatises only in a domestic context, which is rigorously distinguished from
the political sphere: 'One seems entitled to conclude that gratitude has nothing to do with
Lockean politics' ('Rethinking Rights: Theological and Historical Perspectives' [presented
to the Society of Catholic Social Scientists at the American Political Science Association
meeting, Chicago, IL September 1-5, 2004], pp. 17-19 fn. 62). As my colleague Douglas
Wilson observes, this is a limitation of political theory and not of grassroots political
practice. Patriotic gratitude is not in short supply in the US, as witnessed by the
superabundance of flags, yellow ribbons, wrist bands, and similar paraphernalia.
23 With postmodernism's incessant attention to the phenomenology of gifts, gratitude is
making a philosophical comeback, but is normally treated with deep suspicion, as the
'payback' that can only deform gifts and move them back into the realm of capitalist
exchange. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic
Societies (trans. W. D. Halls; London: Routledge, 1993); Jacques Derrida, Given Time I:
Counterfeit Money (trans. Peggy Kamuf; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (trans. Jeffrey
Kosky; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); John Milbank, 'Can A Gift Be
Given?' Modern Theology 11 (1995) 119-61.
24 Ronan, 'Antike Roman': Power Symbology and the Roman Play in Early Modern
England, 1585-1635 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 81: 'this theme
is not at the heart of most Tudor-Stuart tragedies with Christian settings, even if Macbeth
is a striking exception'. Rather, 'most studies of ingratitude-lack of gracious acceptanceare to be found in tragedies with a pagan setting: in other words, beyond the customary
sphere of gratia'. Though 'Roman dramas constitute 30 percent of Shakespeare's oeuvre . .
. concordances suggest that these five plays and Timon contain fully 60 percent of the
dramatist's four dozen uses of words like ingrate, ungrateful, and ingratitude'. Ronan
concludes that 'Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists seem to have viewed the Ancient
world, particularly Rome, as stained with a cruel pride-self-interested, ungenerous,
contentious, murderous. In fact, the Renaissance as a whole makes more of Roman
ingratitude than Antiquity did'.
25 Quoted in Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Theatre and Nation in
Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
26 Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe.
27 Ibid.
28 Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), p. 12.
29 Shakespeare's understanding of gratitude is worked out in a theological context, but I
employ Aquinas here for analytical purposes, and make no claim that Shakespeare knew
the Thomistic theory.
30 The notion, for instance, that we owe taxes only because of the public services we
might receive, violates the trajectory of gratitude, turning political obligations into
narrowly economic transactions.
31 On Thomas' account, loyal attachment to a benefactor would be one possible form of
'repaying' the debt of gratitude, though there would no doubt be others and there would
no doubt be other grounds for loyalty.
32 The importance of ingratitude in Coriolanus has been recognised at least since Dunn,
Ingratitude, pp. 31-2. See also Clifford Chalmers Huffman's Coriolanus in Context
(Lewisburg: Bucknell, 1971), pp. 207-11.
33 In defending Coriolanus' status as a tragic hero, Brian Vickers is particularly good at
describing how every faction of Rome tries to turn the military hero into a puppet who
will advance their interests. In Vickers, Shakespeare: Coriolanus (London: Edward
Arnold, 1976), passim.
34 This summary is taken from R. B. Parker's introduction to the Oxford edition of
Coriolanus, The Tragedy of Coriolanus (Oxford: OUP, 1998). Cathy Shrank offers a fine
summary of the political uses of the play: 'That interpretations of Coriolanus have beenalmost without exception- politicized is as true for modern productions and critical
appraisals as for seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century adaptations. Almost every
constitutional crisis in post-Restoration Britain prompted a rewriting of the play. Nahum
Tate's The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth (1681) places Coriolanus within the context
of the Exclusion Crisis; John Dennis's The Invader of his Country (1719) draws explicit
parallels between Martius and James Stuart, the Old Pretender, evoking Stuart's failed
attempts to invade England in 1708 and 1715; and James Thomson's Coriolanus (1749)
aligns Martius with Charles Stuart, the Young Pretender, in the wake of the Second
Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. The play has similarly reflected the political upheavals of
twentieth-century Europe: in the Mussolini-like death of Laurence Olivier's Martius at
Stratford in 1959, or in the English Shakespeare Company's production of 1990, directed
by Michael Bogdanov, set against the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe'
('Civility and the City in Coriolanus' Shakespeare Quarterly 54 [Winter 2003] 406).
35 It is not difficult to turn the play into a critique of aristocratic elitism: 'What's the
matter, you dissentious rogues,/That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,/make
yourselves scabs?' are Coriolanus' first words in the play, and set the tone for his other
speeches to the plebs. He condemns them as cowardly hares and geese; at his banishment,
he dismisses them as a 'common cry of curs'; and he often complains of their body odour
and bad breath. His politics are profoundly anti-democratic. He wonders at the 'double
worship' of Rome's famously mixed political system, a political system in which 'gentry,
title, wisdom/Cannot conclude but by the yea and no/Of general ignorance' (2.1.144-146).
Could Shakespeare have expected his groundlings to warm to such a tragic hero, or to be
moved to pity and fear by his death? On the other hand, it is difficult not to feel the force
of Martius' opinions. Is it not, in fact, better for the wise and informed to make political
decisions than to subject them to the veto power of the ignorant and apathetic? Further,
Shakespeare does not go out of his way to make the people of Rome sympathetic (a point
made with particular force by Vickers, Coriolanus, pp. 16-17). They do not know what is
good for them, repeatedly demonstrating the truth of Coriolanus' assessment. They
gleefully banish their Hector, not stopping for a moment to ask what it will cost them.
The tribunes cynically manipulate the plebs as much as they do Coriolanus himself, and
are as dictatorial and contemptuous of the people in their own way as Coriolanus is.
36 John M. Wallace makes a similar point when he examines the connections between
Coriolanus and Seneca's De Beneficiis in "The Senecan Context of Coriolanus," Modern
Philology 90 (1993) 465-78.
37 On the uses of analogy, and particularly the analogy of the human body, in
Renaissance political thought, see James Emerson Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's
Greek and Roman Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), Ch. 4.
38 Wallace speaks of the 'ironies and contradictions' and 'meaninglessness' (op. cit., p.
467), yet however falsified by the play, the tale itself is a standard bit of early modern
social theory and was probably meant to be a model of social life.
39 Shakespeare's Roman plays are all overshadowed by an ideal of unified political
order, and in each case Rome fails to live up to its ideal. Rome is always double Rome,
though the doubling of Rome differs from play to play. In Julius Caesar, Rome is initially
divided between the remaining adherents to Pompey and the plebs who celebrate Caesar
(1.1). The division of Rome in Coriolanus is institutionalised by the distinction between
the Senate and the tribunate, who represent the plebs. For a general treatment of the
unnerving underbelly of Menenius' parable, see Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean
Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1969), pp. 341-55.
40 Zvi Jagendorf provides a helpful catalogue: 'legs, arms, tongues, scabs, scratches,
wounds, mouths, teeth, voices, bellies, and toes', 'Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private
Parts', Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990) 458.
41 This is sometimes supported by a punning theoretical riff on the word 'kind': Those
who refuse to receive or return kindness prove that they are of a different kind/genus,
monsters in human shape rather than humans. Besides the obvious words for gratitude
used by Shakespeare, 'kindness' and 'unkindness' were often used as synonyms of
'gratitude' and 'ingratitude', respectively, and 'churl' also carries the specific connotation
of 'ingrate', with the additional suggestion that the ingrate is a non-noble person, whatever
his actual social status (Dunn, Ingratitude, pp. 13, 86-91). See also 'Unkind' in The
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), vol. 11, p. 249 and 'Churl' and
'Churlish' in the same dictionary (vol. 2, pp. 409-410).
42 Brother Anthony of Taize, 'Shakespeare's Monsters of Ingratitude', The Shakespeare
Review (Seoul) (1990), available at www.ccsun7.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony/Ingrate.htm.
43 The ingratitude of the people is manifest both on the battlefield and within the walls of
the city, for in both settings they abandon Martius to fight it out for himself. See E. A. M.
Colman, 'The End of Coriolanus', ELH 34:1 (1967) 10.
44 Brother Anthony, 'Shakespeare's Monsters of Ingratitude'. Also, Terence Eagleton,
Shakespeare and Society: Critical Studies in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Schocken,
1967), pp. 99-104, on the self-defeating or self-consuming character of Rome.
45 See Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 150-51.
46 Cavell notes the Christological resonances of Coriolanus, though in a different way
than I have done.
47 This is the way that Seneca read the story of Coriolanus, and there is reason to think
that Shakespeare was familiar with Seneca's treatise: 'Coriolanus was ungrateful, and
became dutiful late, and after repenting of his crime he did indeed lay down his arms, but
only in the midst of his unnatural warfare' (De Beneficiis, 5.16).
48 Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society, p. 104, makes a similar point in regard to Martius'
reluctance to seek the voices of the plebs: 'Coriolanus . . . envisions no reciprocity: he
sees this mutual relationship of plebeians and patricians as circular, destructive, selfdefeating'. Eagleton compares him to Achilles, seeking 'self-creation without reference to
society' and rejecting any 'need for social verification'.
49 Coriolanus, pp. 23-24.
50 Like all heroes, Martius is caught in a fundamental dilemma: His status as hero is a
matter of reputation, and thus depends entirely on the approval of his fellows, yet in the
agonistic setting of an honour- shame ethic he is striving to rise above his fellows.
Martius attempts to struggle free of the dilemma by refusing the plaudits of his
commanding officer, but is resentfully aware that he depends on them for his fame.
51 Wallace, 'Senecan Context', p. 476, fn. 15, quoting from Joshua Scodel. The same
point is developed at greater length in Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 362-74,
and even more thoroughly and precisely by Carson Holloway, 'Shakespeare's Coriolanus
and Aristotle's Megalopsyuchos', unpublished article provided by the author.
52 Here, and at several other points, Shakespeare has modified Plutarch to emphasise the
hero's isolation.
53 Jagendorf, 'Body Politic', pp. 462-3.
54 Terry Eagleton describes Coriolanus as 'perhaps Shakespeare's most developed study
of a bourgeois individualist', one of those modern 'new men' with pretensions to selfcreation, who 'prefigures the time-not far off from Shakespeare's England-when a whole
society would fall prey to the ideology of self-authorship, when all individuals will be
only begetters of themselves, private entrepreneurs of their bodies and sole proprietors of
a labour force' (William Shakespeare [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], pp. 73-4).
55 Eagleton suggests that Coriolanus refuses to be 'object' in relation to Rome, insisting
instead on remaining 'subject'. Coriolanus thus joins Timon of Athens (and, of course,
Caliban) as one of Shakespeare's great depictions of man in a state of nature. It is
noteworthy that Coriolanus and Timon at least enter the state of nature by renouncing
political society. Isolation is not an originary state, but a corrupted state. And it seems
quite clear that, for all his suspicion of the abuse of authority and law, and for all his
proto-Freudian sense of the pathologies of civilised life, Shakespeare was convinced of
the classical and medieval axiom that humans are a social and political animal.
56 Marjorie Garber puts the matter well: 'More than almost any other Shakespearean
hero, he aims at a status that is less like that of a man and more like that of a dragon, a
god, or a machine-someone or something, in other words, that does not feel. . . . to be
human is to suffer, and that to be aloof from suffering is to turn one's back on humanity,
and to be merely a thing, a tin god" (Shakespeare After All [New York: Pantheon, 2004],
p. 786 ).
57 So Menenius: 'This Volumnia/Is worth of consuls, senators, patricians,/A city full; of
tribunes, such as you,/A sea and land full' (5.4.53-55).
58 Eagleton is thus mistaken to say that Coriolanus 'is basically no more a Roman than
Aufidius is a Volscian' and that he renounces Romanness as soon as it conflicts with his
self-definition (Shakespeare and Society, p. 112). Eagleton accurately describes
Coriolanus' aim, but his capitulation to Volumnia shows that he cannot achieve it. This is
the tragic horror of his self-discovery, that he is intractably Roman after all. Clifford
Chalmers Huffman is on the mark in saying that Martius' decision to abandon his revenge
'reflects his alliance with traditional values that deny total freedom to man's will'
(Huffman, Coriolanus in Context, p. 215).
59 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge.
60 Wallace, who has written the most complete essay on political gratitude in Coriolanus,
is more pessimistic than Shakespeare about the possibility of a political and social order
rooted in gratitude. Harold Goddard has it right: Parable of Menenius is 'the Pauline
doctrine that we are all members one of another', and 'Coriolanus is a poetic
demonstration of this truth, and its hero, with all his virtues, made, by his own
confession, the capital mistake of trying to live 'As if a man were author of himself/and
knew no other kin'. Being an individual is thus 'not enough to be one's self', and Martius'
melting before his mother, wife and son, means that 'for the first time he lets his various
'parts' become members one of another and becomes himself something like the complete
man he never was on the battlefield for all his valor. The dragon reverts to the butterfly'
(The Meaning of Shakespeare [2 vols.; Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1951], vol.
2, pp. 233-4).
61 Battenhouse argues that the apparent tensions in Shakespeare's outlook on Coriolanus
can be resolved by recognizing the Augustinian source of Shakespeare's evaluation of
Rome, his recognition that the virtues of Rome are 'splendid vices' (Shakespearean
Tragedy, pp. 307-10).
62 The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1985), p. 89.
The Body of the Actor in Coriolanus
By Eve Rachele Sanders
(Shakespeare Quarterly: Winter 2006)
For the soule, nor god him selfe can distinctly speake without a bodie, having necessarie
organes and instrumentes mete for the partes of the same, to forme and utter distinct
wordes.
-Plutarch, "The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus"1
THE PIVOTAL EVENT in Shakespeare's Roman history play-Coriolanus's refusal to
show his wounds-is without basis in Roman history. Whereas Plutarch's Coriolanus
simply follows custom, exhibiting his scarred body in the marketplace as a matter of
course, Shakespeare's Coriolanus balks at doing so, pleads against it, relents, declines to
do so, argues against it, agrees reluctantly, refuses outright, relents again, and finally fails
when put to a last test in the scene of his banishment in 3.3.2 What is a mere formality of
rhetoric for Plutarch's Coriolanus becomes for Shakespeare's Coriolanus an explicitly
theatrical exhibit of shame: "a part / That I shall blush in acting" (2.2.144-45). His injured
body offered up only as an inert object, viewed through a thin gown, will not in and of
itself convey battle heroism. In order to gain votes for his wartime exploits, Coriolanus
must add sound track and gesture; embellish the objective facts of his appearance with
emotion and narrative; alter his voice, expression, stance, and dress; modulate his
movements self-consciously; communicate his subjective experience to others; and, in
short, take on the role of an actor.
In this essay, I argue that Shakespeare's invention of a pseudocrisis of modesty in Roman
history, without precedent or analogue in Plutarch, effectively puts Coriolanus at the
center of contemporary controversy over the legitimacy of theater and over ideas about
the body raised by that debate. Yet in framing the play in terms of antitheatrical
controversy, Shakespeare does not follow colleagues who merely reversed the claims of
antitheatricalists to put forward a counterargument. Thomas Heywood, for example,
asserts in An Apology for Actors that the stage, far from exercising a deleterious
influence, instead molds spectators into patriotic subjects and chaste wives.3 Heywood
enlivens his tract with lurid stories of confessions of murderous women. By his account,
two such guilty widows, one in Norfolk and the other in Amsterdam, upon seeing
murders enacted on stage, spontaneously shouted out admissions of their crimes with
identical words: "Oh my husband, my husband!"4 Shakespeare himself had taken a more
unidimensionally protheatrical position in earlier plays such as Hamlet (for instance, by
supporting Heywood's claim about the power of the theater to extract confessions). In
Coriolanus, however, Shakespeare presents the problem with more attention to its
complexity and to the intellectual claims of theater's opponents. Coriolanus appears in the
play as an antitheatrical ideologue who eventually finds, in his own body and in the
theatrical arena of the marketplace, possibilities and constraints that contradict his initial
conception of performance as inherently debasing.
This essay examines Shakespeare's portrait of Coriolanus as a recalcitrant actor via a
historical correlative: the case of Oxford students who in 1592 were assigned theatrical
roles by their professors and who suffered attacks on their reputations as a consequence.
Both in Shakespeare's Coriolanus and in student performances at Oxford, the situation of
a male amateur playing a part on stage provides a vivid test case for key social and
philosophical concerns at stake in the pro- and antitheatrical debates. The argument in
Oxford was set off by student performances of three Latin plays written by the respected
professor and playwright William Gager. By focusing on specific practices and
performances, the professors who participated in the exchange of vitriolic attacks and
counterattacks, Gager and Alberico Gentili (on the protheatrical side) and John Rainolds
(on the antitheatrical side), produced an account of the problem unique in the literature of
such debates. Unlike writers of other such tracts, who rely largely on fanciful anecdotes,
Gager, Gentili, and Rainolds analyze actual stage productions involving actual
individuals. For this reason, reading Coriolanus alongside Rainolds's Th'overthrow of
Stage-Playes puts in relief Shakespeare's engagement with current ideas and conflicts
about the actor's subjective experience of acting. From the safe remove that Roman
history so often afforded Jacobean playwrights with a politically contentious topic,
Shakespeare stages Coriolanus debating the legitimacy of performance with Volumnia
and Menenius, precisely on the same grounds that Rainolds uses to debate Gager and
Gentili; in doing so, he raises the same social and philosophical concerns about
performance that stirred anxiety in Shakespeare's London as in the Oxford of Gager,
Gentili, and Rainolds.
Shakespeare's departure from Plutarch's narrative has been explained in divergent ways
by critics of Coriolanus. Stanley Cavell writes that Coriolanus's concern with the display
of his wounds creates a parallel between Coriolanus and Christ, who showed his wounds
to his disciples, as well as a difference between them; he sees "Coriolanus not so much as
imitating Christ as competing with him."5 Arthur Riss argues that the episode presents a
critique of early seventeenth-century land enclosure: "The play . . . establishes a
correspondence between the impulse to enclose public land and Coriolanus's urge to
enclose his body, a body that the dominant ideology demands be made available for
public use."6 For the majority of critics, however, Coriolanus's refusal to show his
wounds stems from an unwillingness to disclose weakness. To show the wounds, in
Madelon Sprengnether's words, "is to expose his incompleteness, his implicitly castrated
condition"; his refusal to display them, for R. B. Parker, signifies "the denial of
vulnerability on which his sense of unique 'aloneness' is built."7 The envisaged encounter
between the plebeians and Coriolanus, Janet Adelman notes, would have had the effect of
turning his wounds into a visual referent for those similarities he shares with his
spectators: "For his wounds would then become begging mouths (as they do in Julius
Caesar [3.2.225-26]), and their display would reveal his kinship with the plebeians in
several ways: by revealing that he has worked for hire as they have (that is, that he and
his deeds are not sui generis after all); by revealing that he is vulnerable, as they are; and
by revealing, through the persistent identification of wound and mouth, that he too has a
mouth, that he is a feminized and dependent creature." 8
The sacramental and psychosexual dimensions of Coriolanus's wounds, I agree, are
crucial to the fraught response that the idea of baring his body to the crowd triggers in
Coriolanus. Like Christ, Coriolanus expects to command belief without being required to
produce bodily evidence about the nature of his being. The plebeians, in this sense, are
doubting Thomases whose insistence on Coriolanus's producing his wounds to their view
calls into question the quality of their faith in him. Likewise, the sexual dimensions of
Coriolanus's wounds clearly figure in his reluctance to reveal them to the plebeians.
When Coriolanus tells a plebeian, "I have wounds to show you, which shall be yours in
private" (2.3.76-77), the offer is one of promised bodily closeness, a fulfillment of the
plebeian fantasy of intimacy with him ("we are to put our tongues into those wounds" [ll.
6-7]). At the same time, I agree with Cynthia Marshall and Zvi Jagendorf, who qualify
the significance of this interpretive crux by pointing out that Coriolanus himself is
disturbed not so much by any meaning inherent in his wounds as by the indeterminacy of
their meaning in a commercial arena.9
In Rome's marketplace or London's theater, what is most central in the scene of
Coriolanus's failed self-display is that the meaning of the wounds-typological,
psychosexual, or otherwise-is up for grabs. Coriolanus is a study of what it means for
such negotiation to be made the operating principle of a cultural institution, which
thereby becomes a place where all comers can assign or withhold meanings according to
their own intellectual or emotional responses. Seen through the prism of Coriolanus's
fearful anticipation, public theater is imagined as potentially destructive of an actor's very
being, his self-annihilation the possible effect of a body acting without a supervisory
rationality to decide what it articulates. The provocation Shakespeare offers in Coriolanus
is to give credence to this and other underlying assumptions of the antitheatricalists'
arguments. By staging scenes in which characters do change through performance,
Shakespeare underscores how theater, as antitheatricalists feared, displays the
indeterminacy of meaning and identity to a viewing audience. It produces indeterminacy
onstage as a truth as undeniably real, visible to the eye and verifiable to the internal
organs, as the scarring of a battle survivor's torso, sights that solicit responses in the
viewer's breath, gut, and pulse. Coriolanus depicts theater as an arena in which the
onstage presence of the actor's body allows for expanded meanings beyond what social
norms or even the logic of the actor or theatergoer may dictate.10 At once offering a
means to symbolize personas and withstanding reduction to any single construct or
stereotype, the body of the actor onstage motions, turns, extends, bends, steadies,
stumbles, commands, supplicates, beckons, repulses; as it moves spatially, it moves
emotionally and viscerally (that is to say, unpredictably).
The trajectory traced by Coriolanus over the course of the play from antitheatrical
ideologue to shape-shifting actor is obscured somewhat by the play's structure. Like
bookends on opposite sides of the play, the antitheatrical debate in the first half of the
play and the bloody restoration of order in Act 5 distract from Coriolanus's surprising
about-face in the play's middle. In the first three acts, Coriolanus adamantly refuses to
assume different roles and rehearses all the stock arguments of the antitheatrical
pamphleteers in order to defend an essentialist stance. In Acts 4 and 5, however, he
reverses this position. Following his expulsion from Rome, Coriolanus adopts the very
roles of performer and theatergoer he previously eschewed and changes identities in
doing so. The acts of putting on a costume, going on a stage, addressing an audience, and
joining an audience himself to watch a performance force Coriolanus to reexamine his
views about theater and the body and bring him to new conclusions: that his mind may be
made subordinate to the body without loss of dignity; that outward signs of identity are
variable rather than fixed; that his actions are performative, as well as instrumental; and
that agency may be enhanced, not diminished, by the breaching of social categories. Yet
as a reversal, this one is short lived; we are left with a last glimpse of Coriolanus that
mirrors our initial one. In the rescinding action of the fatalistic final scene, categories of
identity (warrior, patrician, and son) that Coriolanus had renegotiated and reconciled in
the scene of his triumphant return to Antium are reinstated as he is taunted and killed.
Ultimately, the dramatic display of power that Aufidius enacts in the final scene by
standing on his rival's corpse confirms with mordant irony the centrality of body and
performance in allowing but also limiting the agency of the actor.
The three Oxford professors who started a public discussion about the body of the actor,
what dangers theater presented to it, and what dangers it presented to spectators
influenced the culture at large for years after their correspondence had ended. In the 1612
Apology for Actors, Heywood recalls the 1592 Oxford controversy with an immediacy
that suggests the earlier episode was still a flash point in ongoing cultural conflicts. In
addressing his colleagues in the theater, "my good Friends and Fellowes, the CittyActors," Heywood specifically praises the leaders of the pro-university drama faction,
William Gager and Alberico Gentili, by name. Heywood writes, "We may as freely (out
of our plainnesse) answere, as they (out of their peruerseness obiect) instancing my selfe
by famous Scalliger, learned Doctor Gager, Doctor Gentiles, and others, whose opinions
and approued arguments on our part, I haue in my briefe discourse altogether omitted;
because . . . their workes being extant to the world, offer themselues freely to euery mans
perusall."11 Heywood's emphasis on the accessibility of Gager's and Gentili's texts
likewise indicates that the specific terms of the debate at Oxford remained influential.
The controversy arose when Gager's staging of his ulysses Redux at Oxford on 6
February 1592, along with two other Latin plays, triggered outrage on the part of John
Rainolds of Corpus Christi College. An angry exchange of letters between Gager and
Rainolds soon erupted into a pamphlet war when Gentili, Regius Professor of Law at
Oxford, took up Gager's cause and took over the role of Rainolds's respondent. A
selection from Rainolds's voluminous letters (in English) was published in 1599 under
the title Th'overthrow of Stage-Playes, with an appendix of selections from Gentili's
letters (in Latin) included in the volume.12
A key to understanding the Oxford debate is that the opposing sides shared the
fundamental premise that acting presents significant hazards.13 The difference between
the positions of the disputants was one more of degree than of kind. Gager and Gentili
held that mitigating factors characteristic of academic theater (the restricted audience, the
fact that the actors were unpaid) so reduced the risks of student performance that they
were outweighed by the benefits (such as training in rhetoric, facility in Latin, and moral
instruction). For his part, Rainolds categorically opposed theater, whether academic or
commercial, due to its damaging impact on performers, "the inconvenience and hurt
which it breedeth, principally to the actors, in whom the earnest care of liuely
representing the lewde demeanour of bad persons doeth worke a great impression of
waxing like vnto them."14 That both sides in the debate shared concerns about the
dangerousness of theater is highlighted when Gentili, writing in defense of the Oxford
student performances, nonetheless approvingly cites Plato's objection to acting: "Plato
used that reason against acting: that imitations of that kind, especially if they have begun
in the earliest years, affect the character and nature, and-as far as the physical health of
the body is concerned-the very expression of the voice and the make-up of the mind
itself. And I am very certain that Plato is speaking the truth."15
Gentili's citation of Plato could almost be a gloss on Rainolds's argument. In Rainolds's
treatise, the words he uses to describe acting, "the earnest care of lively representing,"
emphasize the vigorous physical effort that acting entails. Apparently, the combination of
cognitive focus ("earnest care") and bodily action ("lively representing") is what produces
a powerful effect in the actor, the "great impression of waxing like" the character he
portrays. The choice of "wax" to mean "grow," in conjunction with the word
"impression," registers the perceived passivity of the behavior being described; the actor
busying mind and body with action is conceived as merely on the receiving end of that
activity, like wax imprinted involuntarily, by the forms of thought and motion he mimics.
In a similar vein, but with more detail, Gentili specifies the formative influence of acting,
particularly for children, on the emerging self; in conjunction with the physical
development of the body, the character, nature, voice, and mind of the actor are acted
upon by the process of imitation. The citation of Plato by both pro- and antitheatrical
Oxford professors puts in context Coriolanus's crucial refusal to allow that his "body's
action teach [his] mind / A most inherent baseness" (3.2.122-23). The position that
prompts Coriolanus's refusal to show the wounds was a given for both sides of the debate
rather than an extreme or one-sided view.
Rainolds's Th'overthrow of Stage-Playes further helps elucidate the intransigence of
Coriolanus's position. With its discussion of specific situations involving men and youths,
Rainolds's book emphasizes the practical ways in which performance could harm actual
individuals playing theatrical roles. Repeatedly, Rainolds's accusatory tone heightens in
reference to "the persons, who played on the stage at Christchurch."16 There is the
master of choristers who acted the role of Phemius and whom Gager defends for his
"honestie, modestie, and good voice . . . as worthie to be deliuered from infamie, as
Phemius him selfe is fained to bee saved from death."17 There is the young man of
humble origins (Francis Sidney) who played the role of Ulysses and is so troubled by
Rainolds's charges that "all the troubles of ulysses are nothing to his shame."18 As
Rainolds describes his objections to the performance of ulysses Redux, among other
plays by Gager, potential threats to the student-actors emerge as threefold: loss of social
status, identification with an incorrect model, and imprinting of sexual deviance.
Rainolds compares the student-actor in Gager's play to a male victim of forced sodomy:
"Was he infamous for his suffering? No more then Lucretia for violence done by Tarquin,
how soeuer he died for sorowe and shame of it: the law of God and man both will acquitt
him."19 Rainolds's targeted shaming of individual students who acted in Gager's play is
hardly offset by promised forgiveness in the afterlife. Of course, the actual disgrace
Gager's students may have suffered is far more likely to have come from their negative
portrayals in Rainolds's book. However, by conflating the teaching of drama to university
students with male rape, Rainolds suggests that the damage done to them by theatrical
performance was extreme.
Rainolds also charges Gager with arousing lust in students by allowing them to wear
women's clothes. Recalling Deuteronomy 22:5, he argues that "if anie man doe put on
Womans raiment, hee is dishonested and defiled."20 The reference to the biblical text
links students dressing as female characters with sexual crimes denounced in the Bible.
Women's clothing is said to provoke illicit desires in the male youths who put it on: "For
the apparell of wemen . . . is a great provocation of men to lust and leacherie: because a
womans garment beeing put on a man doeth vehemently touch and moue him with the
remembrance & imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth
stirr vp the desire."21 The ambiguous use of "imagination" to signify the fantasies of the
cross-dressed male, graphic mental images of women, and the process of thinking itself
suggests the scope of performance in comprehensively shaping the actor's inner world.
Cross-dressing, Rainolds implies, is a means of achieving unsanctioned physical intimacy
with women; for the cross-dressed male, entering the material fabric of a woman's
petticoat and bodice with his body is entering a sphere of actual tactile contact with
desire, memory, and fantasy.22
In addition to sexual misconduct, Rainolds believes Gager's students to have been
exposed to feminization and class transgression. Assuming the thoughts, desires, and
gestures of dramatic characters, particularly those characters he considers to be negative
influences (lascivious women and disorderly men), puts the sex and class identities of the
young men performers at risk: "Now, if some might be the woorse for beholding or
playing of the best partes, the partes of Vlysses, and Penelope: what harme might they
receaue by the parts of the Wooers, of Melanthius, of Melantho, of a bragging souldier,
of the drunken mariners, of the Nurse, of Phoedra?"23 It was a standard notion that
transcribing passages about heroic figures would prompt schoolboys to emulate the
models they copied. Rainolds points out the logical application of that pedagogical axiom
about rhetorical imitation to theatrical imitation. Using Phaedra as a classical model in
place of Alexander would threaten inculcation of female lust in place of male valor.
Elsewhere, Rainolds takes the more extreme position that emulation of any female
character, no matter how virtuous-Penelope as much as Phaedra-is deleterious.
Apparently, Gager himself shared this concern to some degree, for he seems to have
directed students in female roles to disrupt the verisimilitude of their impersonations.
Rainolds quotes Gager defending himself from the charge of encouraging transvestism by
describing a moment in which an actor called attention to the discrepancy between his
sex and that of his character: when a male student in a female part in the play "should
haue made courtsie like a woman, hee made a legge like a man."24 At issue here is the
bodily comportment of a specific actor in a particular instance, the youth in a female role
who makes a leg (a bow in which one leg is extended backward and the other is bent)
instead of curtseying. In this case, the actor's disruption of the performative requirements
associated with his role relays, as Judith Butler points out with respect to gender roles
more generally, the possibility for agency that exists in failures to repeat expected
behaviors or speech acts.25 Rainolds's insistence on a complete ban on transvestite
performance, even when an impersonation is demonstrably not verisimilar, suggests his
awareness of the potential for any crossing of roles to expose the contingency of sexual
and social identities. For him, adoption of the comportment, voice, and movements of a
woman is simply forbidden: "Thetis taught Achilles howe to play the woman in gate, in
speech, in gesture. . . . Deidamia gaue him farder advertisements, how he must hold his
naked brest, his hands, & so foorth. These are wemens maners vnseemelie for Achilles to
imitate: he should not haue done it."26
From our historical distance, the vehemence of Rainolds's reaction to the performance of
a few Latin plays for an elite audience of university men seems as misplaced as
Coriolanus's histrionic refusal to show his wounds. Rainolds objects to acting on the basis
of the "hurt which it breedeth, principally to the actors . . . next, to the spectators," while
Gager believes that in academic performances, organized for a select audience, "neither
the spectators . . . nor the actors, could receve any hurt thereby."27 The learned, if also
rancorous, quality of the Oxford debate indicates the gravity with which both sides
interrogated the proposition, echoed later by Coriolanus, that performance is potentially
damaging to actor and theatergoer. In this context, the position Coriolanus stakes out in
refusing the role of actor in spite of what it costs him-career, family, country, and
ultimately life itself-arises out of convictions about the self and the body with Platonic
antecedents, contentious enough to spark a feud at Oxford remembered in London twenty
years later, so unsettling as to make grown men fear defamation, perversion, and
regression from a piece of clothing, phrase, or movement.
Interestingly, the image Shakespeare invokes to introduce his most stridently
antitheatrical character is that of a boy actor in the role of a woman.28 In his initial battle,
Caius Martius is described as a boy acting the part of a man; only later does he become
that part through his military exploits. The first elaborate full-scale praise we hear of the
hero on the battlefield curiously layers the image of a prepubescent Caius Martius in drag
over one of an adult Coriolanus in full masculine martial regalia:
In that day's feats,
When he might act the woman in the scene,
He prov'd best man i'th'field and for his meed
Was brow-bound with the oak.
(2.2.95-98)
This characterization of Coriolanus as a boy actor is purely Shakespearean. Plutarch,
noting Coriolanus's youthfulness in his first battle, says only, "The first time he went to
the warres, being but a strippling."29 The significance of the figurative language inserted
by Shakespeare-the metaphor of the crossdressed boy actor-disturbs the very rhetorical
point it ostensibly was marshaled to make. Cominius invokes the image of a boy actor in
order to denote Coriolanus's matchless courage. Implausibly, in his first battle as a youth,
Coriolanus surpassed battle-seasoned men in strength and maturity. However, raising the
hypothetical possibility of sixteen-year-old Coriolanus in the stage role of a woman also
asks us to imagine him as a boy impostor mimicking deeds on the battlefield to claim an
identity that is, ontologically speaking, not his own.
In the same speech in which he describes Coriolanus as the juvenile stand-in for an adult
warrior, Cominius next describes the man that that boy became with an account of the
battle at Corioles:
He stopp'd the fliers,
And by his rare example made the coward
Turn terror into sport; as weeds before
A vessel under sail, so men obey'd
And fell below his stem: his sword, death's stamp,
Where it did mark, it took. . . .
(ll. 103-8)
Obedience to the adult warrior is presented as a law of physics, the necessity that compels
plants on the sea bottom to give way before the greater mass of a moving warship. The
language of the passage indicates a coterminous relation between will and deed: "Where
it did mark, it took." Coriolanus does what he wills. His deeds are his identity. They
define him socially by demonstrating his valor and they define him subjectively by
concretizing his idea of himself as pure volition, not subject to limitations. When
Cominius refers to "the deeds of Coriolanus" (l. 82), he speaks the deeds in naming the
man: Coriolanus is what he has done, conquering Corioles. The conquest, staged for the
audience in Act 1 and recapitulated by Cominius in Act 2, defines him outwardly by his
status as a Roman hero and inwardly by his sense of self arising from the honorific name,
so that the insult of being called by his given name, "Martius," at the end of the play is
almost a body blow, coming from Aufidius. Coriolanus bases his self-construction on a
fantasy of pure action without performance.30
Yet the play, filled with action in Act 1, shifts from a dramatic mode to a debate mode in
Acts 2 and 3. The predominance of rhetorical declaiming here is such that Stanley Fish
sees Coriolanus as "a play about speech acts,"31 where the dramatic tension lies in the
ability or failure to carry out performative speech acts. In my reading of Coriolanus, this
characterization applies more particularly to Acts 2 and 3, in which pro- and antitheatrical
arguments are exchanged in a plot diversion that highlights, precisely by standing out
from the surrounding action, the centrality of the debate over antitheatricality. The fact
that Acts 2 and 3 are discursive to the exclusion of dramatic action calls our attention to
the play's superimposition of ideas about early modern theater onto a plot dealing with
events in Roman history. This perspective requires looking at performativity not only in
linguistic terms, as Fish does, but also in theatrical and therefore corporeal terms.32
By putting Coriolanus's debate with Menenius and Volumnia at the center of the play,
Shakespeare shifts the focus from external social divisions (plebeians versus patricians,
Romans versus Volscians) to the inner conflict that affects Coriolanus, one rooted in his
fears of what acting as a bodily practice may do to him and his psyche. The same vices
that theater was alleged to generate-falsification, dissimulation, impersonation, and
transgression-are invoked by Coriolanus to reject the demands placed on him to perform
in the marketplace. Falsification and dissimulation involve deception about the inner self;
impersonation and transgression entail disruption of the social order. All four types of
fault, Coriolanus believes, would undermine his hard-won identity as upper class,
masculine, and martial in bearing and being-the antithesis of a boy actor.
Coriolanus's rote iteration of the standard arguments of antitheatrical pamphleteers,
almost as if he had prepared his oration with talking points cribbed from them, steers the
play away from Roman history and anachronistically into the thick of early modern
antitheatrical politics. Initially, the objection Coriolanus raises to the display of his
wounds is that providing such a show would turn his scars, marks of actual bravery, into
marketing symbols for the mere advertising of physical courage to the masses:
It is a part
That I shall blush in acting . . .
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!
(2.2.144-45, 147-50)
The charge that Coriolanus makes here is that showing the scars would be an act of
falsification. He imagines an exchange in which he uses those marks as a visual aid to
accompany a sales pitch about himself to the crowd ("thus I did, and thus"). In that
scenario, the scars are no longer the sign of something real (his deeds in war) but of
something unreal (feats the audience is deceived into believing he performed "for the hire
/ Of their breath"). The part is shameful; it would make him blush to perform it, because
it entails altering the meaning of signs that inscribe his life and being on his own flesh (it
is wrong to show scars, he says, "which I should hide"). For Coriolanus, assigning a
political significance to his scars is an unacceptable distortion of their true meaning.
Here, Coriolanus takes on the view of sixteenth-century antitheatricalists such as
Rainolds, who asserted that "falsehood is the most shameful thing of all."33 For
Rainolds, any misrepresentation, even if committed for a good purpose such as that of a
physician saving a patient's life, is prohibited. Like the antitheatrical polemicists,
Coriolanus considers representation illegitimate as such.
Dissimulation, the second of the antitheatrical tropes central to the play, emerges in
Coriolanus's reproach to his mother for entreating him to change his appearance.
Coriolanus and Volumnia argue about such an action's significance when she urges him
to revisit the marketplace:
CORIOLANUS Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.
VOLUMNIA O sir, sir, sir.
I would have had you put your power well on
Before you had worn it out.
CORIOLANUS Let go.
VOLUMNIA You might have been enough the man you are,
With striving to be less so. . . .
(3.2.14-20)
Here again, in insisting on a strict correlation between playing and being, Coriolanus
reiterates arguments of opponents of the stage. In the words of Stephen Gosson, the
former playwright turned pamphleteer who studied with Rainolds at Oxford, "euery man
must show him selfe outwardly to be such as in deed he is."34 To his mother's requests
that he return to the marketplace, Coriolanus answers, "Rather say I play / The man I
am." Coriolanus defines being in absolute terms: the "I" of his statements, "I play . . . I
am," has a single referent and that unity extends to the action attributed to it. The force of
the phrase "the man I am" stems from the certitude of his vision of acting as indivisible
from being. To answer Coriolanus, Volumnia points out that strategic failings on his part
have undercut his practical ability to claim in actuality the superior status he boasts, that
vaunting his prerogative to rule before having the power to do so makes his bid for consul
predictably self-defeating. Moreover, she argues, he is undermining the very male
identity he claims to be protecting: "You might have been enough the man you are, /
With striving to be less so." "Being," Volumnia suggests, is a more static condition than
we see evident in Coriolanus; his "striving to be" is, in this sense, a contradiction that
puts in question rather than con- firms his masculinity's solidity.35 From Volumnia's
perspective, dissimulation in pursuit of higher office is a way to maintain identity, rather
than the reverse.
Whereas dissimulation involves hiding what one is, impersonation entails showing one's
self as another.36 This is the action Coriolanus is called to perform when he is asked to
embody the persona of a politician working a crowd, a task he experiences as a nearly
physical agony that he vents with outcries of sarcasm and cursing:
What must I say?"I pray, sir,"-Plague upon't! I cannot bring
My tongue to such a pace. "Look, sir, my wounds!
I got them in my country's service, when
Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran
From th'noise of our own drums."
(2.3.51-56)
Impersonation, as the word suggests, involves entering into the attitude of an imaginary
other. In a passage in which he directly contradicts his debate adversary, Rainolds
charges that the actor playing Ulysses would have been exposed to danger by the act of
portraying the Greek hero disguised as a beggar (William Gager's defense is cited in
Rainolds's text in italics): "Moreouer, if Vlysses begging in his owne house, did moue all
the spectators to haue compassion of him, and thereby grew no hurt to them: yet into the
actor might there grow some hurt by acquainting him self with hypocriticall faining of
lyes, hunger, beggerie, wrath, and shedding of blood."37 The notion expressed here,
which Coriolanus shares, is that by inhabiting the mental world of a fictional beggar
(even a beggar supposed to be a hero in actuality) one acquires the attitudes and impulses
of an actual social inferior. Like the antitheatrical polemicists, Coriolanus sees utterances
and bodily motions as consequential, as equally formative of the self as deeds on the
battlefield. In his eyes, obsequious words and gestures, like cowardly acts, demote one
ontologically from hero to commoner.38
The final antitheatrical trope explored by Coriolanus and Volumnia in Act 3, scene 2, is
that of social transgression: the objection that the theater blurred distinctions between
sexes and classes. Along with cross-dressing, Gosson singles out the representation of
kings by common actors as a perjurious practice: "for a meane person to take vpon him
the title of a Prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outward signes to shewe them
selues otherwise then they are, and so with in the compasse of a lye."39 The acting lesson
Volumnia attempts to give Coriolanus involves learning to violate class decorum in
reverse, to adopt lower-class gestures, posture, and speech, much as Gager's Oxford
student playing Ulysses disguised as a beggar would have had to do:
Go to them, with this bonnet in thy hand,
And thus far having stretch'd it-here be with themThy knee bussing the stones-for in such business
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th'ignorant
More learned than the ears-waving thy head,
Which often, thus, correcting thy stout heart,
Now humble as the ripest mulberry
That will not hold the handling. . . .
(3.2.73-80)
The specific choreography Volumnia assigns Coriolanus to accompany his speech-to
remove his hat, to stretch out the hand holding his hat to the people, to kneel, to wave his
head, to lower his gaze-will establish his sincerity. His bodily movements must conform
to his speech in order to elicit the support of the people; he must "go to them," he must
"be with them," approach them, communicate with them, gain their trust, and win their
approval as if he were really to "frame" himself as theirs.
Coriolanus, however, believes that he cannot put off his power, pretend to humility, bow
his nobility before commonness, and remain the same person:
Well, I must do't.
Away my disposition, and possess me
Some harlot's spirit! My throat of war be turn'd,
Which choired with my drum, into a pipe
Small as an eunuch, or the virgin voice
That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up
The glasses of my sight! A beggar's tongue
Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees
Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his
That hath receiv'd an alms! I will not do't,
Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,
And by my body's action teach my mind
A most inherent baseness.
(ll. 110-23)
To this point in the debate, Menenius and Volumnia have been working to persuade
Coriolanus that acting, even if it is primarily symbolic in function and hence suspicious
for the essentialist Coriolanus on those grounds alone, serves an instrumental function in
this particular instance. The argument appears to persuade Coriolanus ("I must do't," he
says). But as he imagines, step by step, what the process of performance would entail, he
becomes convinced it would be more detrimental to his being than beneficial to his
career. Fundamentally, acting for him involves changing categories. As Janet Adelman
has pointed out, the action of asking for votes in the marketplace and hence of revealing
dependency on plebeians, "would undo the process by which he was transformed on the
battlefield from boy or woman to man."40 Adopting behaviors that could link him with
those of lower status would, to paraphrase Cleopatra, "boy" his greatness.41
This anticipation of what it would be like to display his wounds in the marketplace shows
Coriolanus how his body, which had been such a reliable instrument on the battlefield,
here informs on him and how the information it relays is an unbearable negation of his
beliefs. As he imagines it, voice, facial muscles, tongue, and knee would become alien
parts, only grafted to his body, and would function independently of his will. Moreover,
his body would be utterly passive, a body that receives wounds rather than inflicts them,
a body of sweet melodies, smiling cheeks, and bowed posture. The bent knee completes
his shame. A knee that can bend not only to place a foot in a stirrup but also to ask for
favor belongs not to a mythical hero but to a physical being like any other. His body
would refute his claim to exceptionality.
Insistence on an idea of self that the body cannot negate is at the core of Coriolanus's
rejection of acting: "I will not do't, / . . . / And by my body's action teach my mind / A
most inherent baseness" (ll. 120, 122-23). The body is equipped with joints for bending.
Coriolanus suspects that the body's flexibility, its versatility in a variety of circumstances,
could undermine his sense of self as immutable. ("I am constant" [1.1.238], he tells
Cominius; elsewhere, he asserts that he will suffer every kind of torture "yet will I still /
Be thus" [3.2.5-6] to the plebeians.) He fears that what his body will teach his mind is the
lesson of suppleness. The postures and comportments he anticipates assuming would
portray him as like, rather than unlike, the plebeians watching him. Moreover, the spatial
difference between a kneeling Coriolanus and a standing plebeian audience would instill
a radically different self-perception. The contradiction in terms Coriolanus introduces
here, "teach . . . / [an] . . . inherent baseness," exposes the logical inconsistency in the
antitheatrical argument that social identities are both essential and unfixed, both innate
and malleable. His terrified anticipation of kneeling as a self-shattering move
inadvertently discloses the fragility of his hardened-warrior persona, armored to
withstand the asssault of columns of soldiers, yet vulnerable to a motion of the knee.
Enter Coriolanus in mean apparel, disguised and muffled.
(4.4 sd)
The entrance is out of the blue. Suddenly, Coriolanus is shown to have rejected the
central belief for which he suffered exile in the first place. Here, his former insistence on
an absolute continuity between signs and essences is contradicted by his changed
appearance. Like Gager's disguised Ulysses, Coriolanus wears the shabby clothes of a
beggar, his exterior deliberately "muffled" to mislead onlookers. He is homeless and
nameless, "a kind of nothing" (5.1.13). From that blank, Coriolanus, who in exile
distances himself from his name, constructs the persona of an anonymous beggar.42 The
subservience and arti- fice Coriolanus adopts here extend beyond his beggar's costume.
Coriolanus speaks the pat lines of a stage character setting the scene ("A goodly city is
this Antium") and addresses a plebeian respectfully ("Save you, sir . . . Thank you, sir")
to avoid being attacked by "wives with spits, and boys with stones" (4.4.1-11). Earlier, he
had rejected those behaviors on the grounds that they would make him appear as a
performer without agency.
Now that he is again behind enemy lines, Coriolanus is able to adopt those behaviors for
their instrumental value. The contradiction, earlier underscored by Volumnia, seems not
to register. Apparently, he believed that once off the battlefield, disguising, faking, and
appealing to the masses would place him outside his social category and therefore
constitute mere performance. Now, in an enemy city, those same actions seem justifiable
to Coriolanus because he views them as military strategies, the use of which confirms his
valor. That rationalization, however, is at odds with the fact that, as Rainolds feared
might happen to an actor or a spectator, Coriolanus does seem to change as he acts
various roles and witnesses performances by others. His sense of self in Acts 4 and 5 is
much more plural and variable than it was in the previous three acts, in which Coriolanus
attempted to define himself exclusively through his military deeds. When he responds
sympathetically in the culminating scene of the embassy led by his mother, it is as if the
experience of acting the role of a beggar has indeed changed him, as if it had made him
more susceptible to emotion and more aware of the social basis of his identity.
In Acts 4 and 5, Coriolanus's straightforward assertions about appearance and identity in
the first half of the play undergo qualification and correction. In the first three acts,
Coriolanus's body is presented as the luminous sign of a godlike essence. Not only his
outward features and stature but his movements and bearing are seen to convey his
matchless status. Even the tribunes recognize, in the words of Brutus, how Coriolanus's
appearance compels submission and obeisance: "As if that whatsoever god who leads
him / Were slily crept into his human powers, / And gave him graceful posture" (2.1.21719). The pun on "graceful" captures a notion of agile bodily comportment as a function
and expression of the seemingly omnipotent warrior's quasi-divine status.43 It is that
absolute principle of signs denoting essences that Coriolanus abandons when he puts on
tattered clothes. The sequence involving his arrival in disguise in Antium is the second
instance in the play, along with Coriolanus's refusal to show his wounds, where
Shakespeare markedly diverges from and enlarges upon Plutarch. Whereas Plutarch
represents Coriolanus as retaining a visible appearance of nobility through his ragged
exterior, Shakespeare makes that superior status invisible to onlookers, including
Aufidius's servants, one of whom says that he would have beaten Coriolanus "like a dog"
(4.5.52) if it would not have disturbed the noblemen in the house. "What are you?" a third
servant asks Coriolanus. The reply, "a gentleman," meets with a sceptical response: "A
marv'llous poor one" (ll. 27-29).
This banter between Coriolanus and the servants helps set up the incongruous situation in
which Coriolanus, the previous upholder of class difference at any price, is made to
acknowledge the unreliability of outward signs as indicators of origins and status.
Moreover, to avoid the confusion being attributed to plebeian lack of discernment,
Shakespeare prolongs the scene to show that Aufidius has little more perspicacity about
the identity of his guest. While Aufidius offers some respect and a glimmer of
recognition ("Though thy tackle's torn, / Thou show'st a noble vessel" [ll. 62-63]), he
remains baffled by the identity of the stranger before him. Aufidius's increasingly
impatient demands that the stranger name himself-six times putting the question to himunderscore Coriolanus's persistent belief that his true self will shine through his disguise.
The humorousness of this error is emphasized later by the belated attempts of Aufidius's
servants to claim awareness of the importance of the man they had attempted to drive
from their gates. Lines that contribute to the joke in 4.5 ("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"
[ll. 157-59]), the only funny scene in the play, underscore the discrepancy between
signifiers and signifieds that Coriolanus has worked so strenuously to yoke. Ironically,
the position that he is not what he appears, the reverse of what he earlier asserted, is what
he now must claim in order to retain a merely human status, above that of a dog. Nothing
intrinsic makes him recognizable or discloses the "I" he presses Aufidius to acknowledge:
"Think me for the man I am" (l. 57).
Volumnia's intercession in Act 5 is a culminating moment in Coriolanus's engagement
with performance's destabilizing effects on identity. Shakespeare prepares for the
climactic scene of Volumnia's appeal to her son's emotions with a series of theatrical
metaphors. The sight of the group led by his mother brings Coriolanus to compare
himself to an actor who has forgotten his lines: "Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my
part and I am out, / Even to a full disgrace" (5.3.40-42).
While Coriolanus may be a "dull actor," Volumnia compels notice in performing the
intercessor's role that she terms "a mother's part" (l. 168). There are divine spectators on
hand; "the gods look down" and laugh, Coriolanus says, at "this unnatural scene" (ll. 18485). Apart from these images, the events acted in the scene are theatrical as well. With
the lives of Rome's inhabitants in the balance, Volumnia appears before her son in the
worn clothing of a victim of war, delivers a powerful series of formal speeches, and
guides the movements of the supplicants to achieve maximum effect. At line 52, she
commands her son to stand, and she kneels (l. 57), representing what Coriolanus
interprets as the inversion of nature. Her next stage direction, "Your knee, sirrah," is to
her grandson, whom she instructs to kneel (l. 75). When Coriolanus attempts to rise and
leave the room (l. 131), Volumnia directs him to remain. Ordinary interaction is refigured
in symbolic poses, movements, and choreographies directed by Volumnia.
Having failed in his bid to leave the room in order to avert response and verbal reply,
Coriolanus rotates his body to avoid looking ("He turns away" [l. 168]). Volumnia then
issues her final and most effective stage direction to Virgilia and Valeria: "Down ladies:
let us shame him with our knees. / To his surname Coriolanus longs more pride / Than
pity to our prayers. Down! an end" (ll. 169-71). From the supplicants' first entrance,
Volumnia has intended that merely the sight of them, without words or any particular
gestures, will compel Coriolanus to renounce violence against them. "Should we be silent
and not speak," Volumnia contends, "our raiment / And state of bodies would bewray
what life / We have led since thy exile" (ll. 94-96). The initial tableau of the victims of
war-an old woman, two younger women, and a little boy- almost has that effect. The
moment when Coriolanus rises is very much like that in Hamlet, when Claudius stands
abruptly to avoid watching a spectacle that pierces his conscience. Here, we gauge impact
by a spectator's attempt to cover his emotion. Coriolanus tries to leave, explaining that
the sight before him is too much to bear: "Not of a woman's tenderness to be, / Requires
nor child nor woman's face to see. / I have sat too long" (ll. 129-31). The rhyme on "see"
and "be" suggests that the first step toward becoming woman- or childlike is to see the
suffering of women and children. The danger Coriolanus ascribes to the role of a
spectator-acting as precursor to being-parallels that which earlier unnerved him about the
role of an actor.
Yet more is required in Volumnia's performance to bring about the scene's culmination
and Coriolanus's capitulation. In the next moment, when all three women go down on
their knees before him, his body's action teaches Coriolanus's mind. The sight of the
kneeling women produces a like response in him. Their action is followed, as the stage
direction tells us, by immediate wordless concession: "(Holds her by the hand silent.)" (l.
182 sd). "In the entire First Folio," Jarrett Walker reminds us, "this is the only stage
direction that specifically demands a total stop to both speech and action."44 This
absolute cessation, paralysis, and silence highlight Coriolanus's profound response as a
spectator to the women's kneeling and solicits a comparable, if undefinable, response in
the theater audience watching him. When Coriolanus again speaks, it is to acknowledge
another physical aspect of his response to the performance-that he is weeping, or, as he
says, putting a virile gloss on tears, that his "eyes . . . sweat compassion" (l. 196).
In case we missed the parallel between Coriolanus bowing internally in this scene and his
refusal to do so in external gesture earlier, Shakespeare elaborates it for us in a
conversation between Volscians:
AUFIDIUS He bow'd his nature, never known before
But to be rough, unswayable and free.
THIRD CONSPIRATOR Sir, his stoutness
When he did stand for consul, which he lost
By lack of stooping.
(5.6.25-29)
Here in Act 5, Coriolanus "bow[s] his nature," whereas he refused to bow even his body
in Acts 2 and 3. Aufidius finds it an astounding change in a man "never known before /
But to be rough, unswayable and free." The parallel between the two moments, which
Aufidius takes as evidence of treason, Shakespeare marshals as testimony to the power of
theater. In the Oxford debate, Gager predicted that the audience would be moved by the
theatrical spectacle in ulysses Redux to feel compassion for Ulysses in seeing him
brought to penury in his own house. By contrast, Rainolds thought representing a beggar
would bring the actor playing the role to lose moral judgment and social standing.
Interestingly, the scene in which we witness Coriolanus affected so intensely by the
kneeling of his mother and her companions corroborates the positions of both Gager and
Rainolds. As spectator of his mother's action, Coriolanus is moved to compassion for the
person humbling herself publicly before him. As actor of his own gesture-his silent
reaching to take his mother's hand-he is altered by acting the part of son rather than that
of military leader, by his acceptance of a more subordinate role.
Having reassumed his identity as son, which he had earlier discarded as inimical to his
identity as warrior, Coriolanus now is seemingly able to reconcile roles that previously
divided him.45 Our next view of Coriolanus, after seeing him hand in hand with
Volumnia, is of him marching in step with the Volscian plebeians: "Enter Coriolanus
marching with drum and colours, the Commoners being with him" (l. 70 sd). With drums
beating and standards flying as he goes, "great shouts of the people" (l. 49 sd) splitting
the air with acclaim, Coriolanus returns to Antium, flanked by supporters, vigorous,
confident, and in command of commoners whom earlier he had striven to alienate rather
than to lead. The image is one that evokes and revises his earlier fear of losing himself in
the crowd, or, as Stanley Cavell has it, of "simply being part, one member among others
of the same organism."46 Now, by contrast, Coriolanus consents to being a member,
albeit as head, of a procession formed with plebeians. Through his body's actions,
Coriolanus presents a persona at variance with that of the rigid masculine warrior from
the first three-and-a-half acts. Presenting himself to the Volscian patricians as "your
soldier" (l. 71), he expresses his continued confidence in being able to sustain a heroic
persona as well. In departing from character in these late scenes in Act 5, he concedes,
against all earlier denials, that his being exceeds his former identity and is capacious
enough to contain opposing dimensions.
Coriolanus's willingness to define himself as variable, however, exposes him to
reinterpretation and revaluation. Indeed, he again is likened to a juvenile actor. When
Coriolanus presents himself to the Volscian patricians as their general, he invokes Mars
but finds himself derided instead as a boyimpersonator:
AUFIDIUS Name not the god, thou boy of tears! . . .
CORIOLANUS "Boy"! O slave! . . .
. . . Boy! False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioles.
(ll. 101, 104, 112-115)
The identity now thrust on him is one he thought to have discarded at sixteen: the
smooth-faced youth who only imitates a man he is not. His spluttering repetition of the
insult hurled against him only reinforces Aufidius's charge. The heroic identity that he
had so carefully and so strenuously constructed from early youth can be undone in a
simple movement of his hand or moistening of his eyes. Aufidius's jeering recall of
Coriolanus's tears validates one of Rainolds's rejoinders to Gager about theater providing
predictable moral benefits: "your generall propositions, that all the spectators must
needes bee mooved thus or thus thereby, are vntrue."47 A show of vulnerability that
moves one spectator to pity may move another to butchery.
For Coriolanus, who has struggled for so much of the play over questions of identity and
being, this confrontation with Aufidius and his armed conspirators presents a
determinative clash between self-conception and physical existence. His idea of himself,
elaborated with multiple extended metaphors over five acts, is here condensed to the
simplest construction possible, subjectverb- object: "I / Flutter'd your Volscians." In this
phrase, Coriolanus is again briefly the subject of all action, the eagle amidst a massacre
of doves, his Volscian enemies hapless objects of his killing power. The choice of verb,
"flutter'd," diminishes the Volscians, even as it enlarges Coriolanus by making the image
of their death and maiming just the least weightless fluttering of his eagle's wings. But
Coriolanus fails in this reassertion of himself as hero to negate the slur of "boy." Actions
speak louder when the conspirators set upon him, and his verbal claims to metaphysical
supremacy turn to farce in the ensuing scuffle: "The Conspirators draw, and kill Martius,
who falls; Aufidius stands on him" (l. 130 sd). No body could be less an agent than the
corpse on which Aufidius now stands absurdly, as if to underscore the point. The play
finishes with a stage direction, "Exeunt, bearing the body of Martius. A dead march
sounded" (l. 154 sd). With that march, the sight kept from the plebeians over five acts,
and from the audience as well, is exposed at last: the body and its wounds displayed for
public view.
By intervening in contemporary debates over the legitimacy and place of the theater,
Shakespeare creates a concrete case, purely fictional in nature, to interrogate them
further. His position in Coriolanus is that the distinction between real-life action,
conceived as truthful and straightforward, and theatrical performance, conceived as
contrived and deceptive, is untenable. At the same time that Shakespeare makes this
protheatrical point, however, he also acknowledges an argument found in antitheatrical
tracts: performance does indeed alter the actor, as well as the spectator, and it does so in
ways that are unpredictable and variable. The difference between action and
performance, which Coriolanus, following the antitheatricalists, rationalizes in terms of
truth and falsehood, comes down to whether one is acting within one's assigned social
role or outside it. If it is evident that stage acting, which implies impersonation, is by
definition performance, it is less obvious that all social behavior, which at least
potentially risks transgression of established categories, is performance also. And if it is
taken as given that theater affects actor and spectator, it is a matter of historical and
dramatic scrutiny what the specific scope and quality of that impact will be in the
particular cases in which individuals wrestle idiosyncratically and strategically with
scripted lines and stage directions.
In the parlance of contemporary social theory, the question raised in the Oxford
controversy and in Coriolanus could be rephrased in this way: "What are the concrete
conditions under which agency becomes possible?"48 The question, posed by Judith
Butler in a volume presenting opposed feminist views on the ontology and agency of the
subject, in fact is similar to that raised by pro- and antitheatrical writers in the early
seventeenth century: to what extent does the enactment of mental states, verbal
utterances, and bodily postures inform decision making and action on the part of the
actor? Coriolanus disdains theatrical behaviors on the grounds that performing them
would limit his scope for action and allow his body to inform his mind and his image,
that such behaviors would cause him to appear as a performer without agency. However,
over the course of the play and under conditions particular to his place, time, and
dramatic situation, he is made to acknowledge the potential for agency located precisely
in those practices he had seen as being inimical to it. His experiences as an actor in
Antium and as a spectator at the gates of Rome, moments that subject him to the status of
beggar and son, paradoxically also expand his scope for action as a popular leader and
release him from the tragic social codes that would have made his masculine identity
depend once more on a city's annihilation.
The agency Coriolanus discovers as an actor lies not only in the ability to utter
performative speech acts but also in the capacity to enact physical gestures and behaviors
for strategic ends. Contrary to his initial preconceptions, Coriolanus finds in his body the
physical might to impose his will by violence and the lithe fluidity to elicit cooperation in
others. By insisting on the body as a medium of communication, as well as a tool for
instrumental action, this play shows that action inevitably involves doing and performing.
In this sense, the antithesis that Coriolanus makes the linchpin of his existence-action as
the highest virtue, performance as the basest disgrace-falsely separates what is
inextricably linked. In his very efforts to repudiate performance (varying his voice,
bending his posture, wearing a gown, and responding to the desires of a marketplace
audience), Coriolanus's fantasy of action ultimately cannot withstand the reality of the
body that is its instrument.
In the end, the agency of the actor in this play stems from a capacity to acquire an
identity, to maintain one's position within established categories, and to depart from those
categories when a situation requires it.49 The theater in early modern England showed
that it was possible for actors (and the spectators identifying with them) to change
personas as swiftly as they changed clothes, to evade roles assigned to them, and
therefore to broaden their sense of agency.50 In such a context, the body is not the
transparent signifier of one's fundamental being but an adaptable instrument for shaping
identities and perceptions. Plutarch's point about the necessity of having a body, that even
the soul or God needs organs of speech, is borne out by the play's foregrounding of
Coriolanus's physical being, whether as an object of popular adulation or as a corpse on a
stage. By showing Coriolanus's body for what it is-the body of the actor, with all of its
supposed defects, its joints, its scars, its origins in a boy's body and a woman's-and what
it can do, its force in its very humanity and limitation to move the audience and the
action, Coriolanus stages both the inevitability of performance and the opening for
agency it allows.
[Footnote]
1 Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Sir Thomas North, in
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (New
York: Columbia UP, 1957-77), 5:505-49, esp. 5:542.
2 Quotations follow Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, Arden2 (London: Methuen, 1976).
3 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612; repr., Delmar, NY: Scholar's
Facsimile & Reprints, 1978), sigs. F3^sup v^ and G1^sup v^.
4 Heywood, sigs. G1^sup v^ and G2^sup v^.
5 Stanley Cavell, "Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics ('Who does the wolf love?'),"
in Disowning Knowledge: in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1987), 143-77, esp. 157.
6 Arthur Riss, "The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language," ELH 59
(1992): 53-75, esp. 55.
7 Madelon Sprengnether, "Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus," in Women in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. and intro.
Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986), 89-111, esp. 101; and R. B. Parker,
"Introduction," in The Tragedy of Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), 1-148, esp. 66.
8 Janet Adelman, "'Anger's My Meat': Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in
Coriolanus," in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay
L. Halio (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1978), 108-48, esp. 114-15.
9 Cynthia Marshall, "Wound-Man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction
of Interiority," in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed.
Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1996), 93-118; and Zvi Jagendorf, "Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts," SQ 41
(1990): 455-69.
10 For other accounts of performance in Coriolanus, see Anne Barton, "Julius Caesar and
Coriolanus: Shakespeare's Roman World of Words," in Shakespeare's Craft: Eight
Lectures, ed. and intro. Philip H. Highfill, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP for The
George Washington University, 1982), 24-47, esp. 36; Sprengnether, 103; and Janet
Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal origin in Shakespeare's Plays,
"Hamlet" to "The Tempest" (New York: Routledge, 1992), 164.
11 Heywood, sigs. A3^sup r^-A3^sup v^.
12 John Rainolds, The overthrow of Stage-Plays by the Way of Controversy between D.
Gager and D. Rainolds, intro. J. W. Binns (1599; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint
Corporation, 1972). Unless otherwise specified, italics appearing in the original edition
are retained.
13 E. K. Chambers makes this point: "The problem with which, long before the
University disputants handled the matter at all, the London Puritans had to deal, was not
one of nice differentiation between the position of the amateur and that of the
professional player. Their concern with the academic drama was comparatively small;
some at least of them were prepared to subscribe to all the allowances for it that were
made by the Synod of NÎmes. What they were face to face with was the rapid growth in
London of professional playing as a recognized occupation, using an increasing number
of playing-places, almost entirely free from control on its ethical side, and tending more
and more to become a permanent element in the life of the community. And the attitude
of condemnation which they adopted was in the main one in which Lutheran, Calvinist,
and humanist, Case and Gager no less than Rainolds, would in theory at least have
concurred." See The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (1923; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1951), 1:253.
14 Rainolds, sig. O4^sup v^.
15 Alberto Gentili, Commentary on the Third Law of the Title of the Code, "on Teachers
and Doctors," trans. J. W. Binns, "Alberico Gentili in Defense of Poetry and Acting,"
Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972): 224-72, esp. 268.
16 Rainolds, sig. E1^sup r^.
17 Rainolds, sig. E2^sup r^.
18 Rainolds, sig. F3^sup v^.
19 Rainolds, sig. F4^sup v^.
20 Rainolds, sig. C4^sup v^.
21 Rainolds, sig. N3^sup r^ (italics deleted).
22 See Lisa Jardine, " 'As boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour':
Female Roles and Elizabethan Eroticism," in Still Harping on Daughters (Brighton,
Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983), 9-36, esp. 15-17.
23 Rainolds, sigs. P2v-P3^sup r^.
24 Rainolds, sig. P1^sup r^.
25 Judith Butler's observation about the implications of cross-gender impersonation is
pertinent here: "in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of
gender itself-as well as its contingency." See Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge,
1990), 137.
26 Rainolds, sig. D1^sup r^.
27 Rainolds, sig. O4^sup v^.
28 The buried adolescent connection with cross-dressing is one that Shakespeare's
Coriolanus shares with the antitheatricalist John Rainolds, who played the role of
Hippolyta in Richard Edwardes's Palamon and Arcyte at Christ Church in 1566. See
William Ringler, Stephen Gosson: A Biographical and Critical Study (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1942), 14.
29 Bullough, 5:507.
30 Lisa Lowe and Stanley Fish both discuss the role of fantasy or fiction in Coriolanus's
self-construction. For Lowe, "The hero clings to a fantasy of an absolute unsocial
identity, undetermined by social relations, unnamed, unpositioned, and uncompromised";
see " 'Say I play the man I am': Gender and Politics in Coriolanus," Kenyon Review, n.s.
8.4 (1986): 86-95, esp. 94. In Stanley Fish's terms, Coriolanus has to pay the ultimate
penalty for abiding by "the abstraction [of ] the totally autonomous self "; "at the very
moment that he pays the penalty," Fish concludes, "Coriolanus exposes that abstraction
as a fiction." See "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech-Act Theory and
Literary Criticism," in is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of interpretive
Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980), 197-245, esp. 219.
31 Fish, 200.
32 For a discussion of performativity and its double meaning in the formation of gender
identity, see the essays by Seyla Benhabib, "Subjectivity, Historiography, and Politics,"
107-25, esp. 108-9, and Judith Butler, "For a Careful Reading," 127-43, esp. 134, in
Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler,
Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Frasier (New York: Routledge, 1995).
33 John Rainolds, in a letter to Alberico Gentili dated 10 July 1593. See Latin
Correspondence by Alberico Gentili and John Rainolds on Academic Drama, trans. Leon
Markowicz (Salzburg: Institut für Sprache and Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977), 2035, esp. 26-27. Falsification, which the antitheatricalists connected narrowly to the
theater, was an acknowledged dimension of rhetorical discourse generally. Cicero
himself, as Barton points out, acknowledged the potential for transmitting wrong
impressions through language: "Sometimes, the use of language to express fact results in
gross distortion, in a picture of things that is 'clean from the purpose of the things
themselves,' as Cicero warned. At other times, the falsification is only slight: the
necessary concomitant of translation onto another level. It is inevitable, however, that
facts should in some measure be transformed by being spoken about-and it is precisely
this transformation that Coriolanus cannot endure" (34).
34 Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, intro. Peter Davison (1582; repr.,
New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972), sig. E5^sup r^.
35 For a similar observation, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 153.
36 Perceptions of impersonation are generally, as Erving Goffman observes, highly
context specific; see The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1958), 39.
37 Rainolds, sig. P2^sup v^.
38 In Anthony Giddens's terms, "The point is that the sustaining of 'being seen as a
capable agent' is intrinsic to what agency is, and that the motives which prompt and
reinforce this connection as inherent in the reproduction of social practices are the same
as those which order such reproduction itself." See The Constitution of Society: outline
of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984), 80.
39 Gosson, sig. E5^sup r^.
40 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 151.
41 Cleopatra's use of "boy" as a transitive verb to point to the deficiency of transvestite
representation of her character, as other critics have noted, ironically flaunts the talents of
the boy actor pronouncing the lines: "I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my
greatness / I' the posture of a whore" (Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley, Arden
Shakespeare, 9th ed. [1954; rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1956], 5.2.218-20). In contrast to
Cleopatra, Coriolanus is threatened not by the specter of discrepancy between himself
and a boy actor but by that of similitude.
42 Coriolanus's adoption of disguise in this scene raises the question of what he had been
wearing previously on stage. Marion Trousdale suggests that Coriolanus's costume was a
hybrid of classical Roman and early modern English apparel and grooming: "In addition
to wearing a Roman kirtle, Coriolanus it would appear has a beard and wears a hat. This
makes him not only a Roman but an Elizabethan Roman, one for whom the ability to act
a part with props at hand was as important as being able to sway a mob." See "Coriolanus
and the Playgoer in 1609," in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
Drama: Essays for G. K. Hunter, ed. Murray Biggs, Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank,
and Eugene M. Waith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991), 124-34, esp. 132.
43 The symmetry Coriolanus tries to attain between his social identity and selfcomportment enhances a notion of that identity as God given. Goffman's observation
about the impression of perfect qualification that individuals try to convey in order to
legitimate positions (29) applies to Coriolanus as well.
44 Jarrett Walker, "Voiceless Bodies and Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human
Perception in Coriolanus," SQ 43 (1992): 170-85, esp. 180.
45 My argument here contradicts a widely held consensus about the play, namely, that
Coriolanus does not learn in the course of it. Walker, for instance, argues that the
character "shows little sign of having been changed. . . . Martius dies not as a result of
being changed but as a result of his old behavior, a precise replay of the responses that
triggered his banishment" (184, 185). "Unlike some of Shakespeare's heroes," Fish
concurs, "Coriolanus never learns anything" (219-20).
46 Cavell, 169.
47 Rainolds, sig. P3^sup r^.
48 Butler, "For a Careful Reading," 136.
49 The notion of agency on which I rely in this essay concerns the scope for decision
making and action available to a given individual in a specific context; as Giddens writes,
"Agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the
individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently.
Whatever happened would not have happened if that individual had not intervened" (9).
For a caution against confusing agency with autonomy, see Emily C. Bartels, "Breaking
the Illusion of Being: Shakespeare and the Performance of Self," Theatre Journal 46.2
(1994): 171-85, esp. 171.
50 On the complexities of the performance of social identity in early modern England,
see Trousdale, 124.