Coriolanus – William Shakespeare, c. 1609 ★★★

John Galt in a Toga

Any Shakespeare play that leaves people with totally different interpretations regarding the nature of the lead character can’t be all bad.

The first time I read Coriolanus was in college. A kindly professor laid out the case for seeing Coriolanus as a kind of fascist strongman brought down by his contempt for the people. I went away comforted in my small-L liberalism. The next time I read it, it was hard not to see Coriolanus as something else entirely, a deserving member of the meritocracy brought down by an envious, parasitic mob moved by envy, not need. In short, John Galt in a toga.

Ambiguity is a kind of rule with Coriolanus, a play that contains more about-faces than anything else I recall from Shakespeare save Timon Of Athens and a surprisingly murky sense of justice from a playwright who liked moral absolutes. Widely suspected to have been Shakespeare’s last tragedy, written in 1608-09, it lacks the vitality or singular inspiration you expect from the seasoned tragedian of MacBeth or King Lear.

It has a fantastic first act as I read it, brimming with great dialogue, highly charged scenes, and a well-extended battle sequence. Act I also tidily, pungently presents the core issue of the rest of the play, Coriolanus’s contempt for the crowd:

He that trusts to you,

Where he should find you lions, finds you hares

Where foxes, geese. You are no surer, no,

Than is the coal of fire upon the ice

Or hailstone in the sun…[Act I. scene i. Lines 171-175]

A damning verdict, yet no worse than what Shakespeare himself offers.

The Romans we meet in the opening scene are an unlikeable lot, prone to violent expression but rather dim. We discover this when they tangle with Menenius Agrippa, a Roman senator who is a friend to Coriolanus. Menenius wittily relates a parable about a rebellion of the human body against the stomach, which gets all the nourishment but does none of the work. “I am the store-house and the shop/Of the whole body” the belly replies. The object is that the benefit of serving the elite trickles down to the populace in the form of its motive power.

This is a cleverly written sequence, showcasing rare and needed humor as well as a sense of real human conversation between Menenius and the most outspoken protester, the First Citizen. It also showcases fantastic imagery and a ruthless parody of punditry that holds up today. Menenius suggests we are about to meet a cast of wondrously rich and dynamic characters; alas there are only three, those being him; Coriolanus; and Coriolanus’s mother-from-hell, Volumnia.

Still, those are three more such characters than many plays have, including a few by the Bard himself.

While not performed as often as other Shakespeare plays, Coriolanus has been well-staged on occasion. A 2010 film directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes is a worthy modernization of the drama; but my preference is this 1962 audio recording starring Richard Burton, with brilliant assists from Jessica Tandy as Volumnia and Michael Hordern as Menenius. Image from https://www.discogs.com/William-Shakespeare-Richard-Burton-2-Jessica-Tandy-Kenneth-Haigh-Michael-Hordern-Robert-Stephens-2-M/release/9735810

Coriolanus starts the play as Marcius, a noble warrior who serves Rome’s patrician class more than he does the city. He wins the name “Coriolanus” from an early victory we see him perform with great aplomb. Marcius is lambasted by the crowd as too “proud” and an “enemy to the people.” When he shows up, he wastes little time giving them his two doits. They want food, he says, but don’t want to leave the city and fight for it against Rome’s foes. He has a point.

In the original source material for this play, a translation of a history by Plutarch which appeared a few years before the play and which is excerpted in my Signet Classic edition, the gripes of Roman citizens are explained as being principally not over food but usury. Roman aristocrats were loaning citizens desperately needed money and ruthlessly transforming them into debt slaves.

Here, there is passing mention of usury but the main object is food kept in store for the city in times of need. No argument is made of people starving, just that they want what they don’t have and are mad at those who won’t give it to them. They talk of hunger, but their case is really more about want:

What authority surfeits on would relieve us: if they
would yield us but the superfluity, while it were
wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely;
but they think we are too dear: the leanness that
afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an
inventory to particularise their abundance; our
sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with
our pikes, ere we become rakes… [I.i.16-24]

To observe Menenius talk circles around these radicals is pleasing in a twisted way. Then Marcius-not-yet-Coriolanus shows up to present the other side of the case.

The people do have a point about Marcius’ coldness, revealed in his favorite term for them: “Hang ‘em!” [An audio performance of the play available on YouTube showcases Coriolanus the haughty elitist as emphatically portrayed by Richard Burton.] He’s just not that dangerous a character. He resents the inroads to power the plebeians are making, enough to vent about it in their presence, but his shoulder-shrugging manner shows he is resigned to it as part of a new world order. He prefers to fight and leave the power trappings to others. He even declines booty he took from an enemy city.

What kind of tragic hero is Coriolanus, anyway? He is partly the agent of his own destruction, partly undone by the gods, yet largely unknowable throughout the play. He has a few soliloquys, where he impresses not with Hamlet’s tortured introspection or MacBeth’s plotting but rather a cold brevity that occasionally gives way to splenic tirades. The commoners calling him “a very dog to the commonalty” is meant as attack dog but more apropos to the idea of all bark, no bite. Coriolanus saves his killing blows for Rome’s foes.

About the only insight we gain into Coriolanus that pulls him from the two-dimensional personification of elitism is in the character of Volumnia. She’s revealed at first sight as the author of her son’s pride and violent nature:

Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action. [I.iii.22-27]

Volumnia even upbraids Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia for fretting over her husband’s fate in battle, instead of glorying over the prospect of slain foesmen. It’s revealing how, while Coriolanus greets Virgilia warmly when they meet, his greetings with Mother are always correct and stiff. He honors Volumnia, but doesn’t like her.

Neither should we. Volumnia is one of those rare characters in Shakespeare who is pure in their rottenness. I can’t think of another female character to top her; even Lady MacBeth reveals a conscience in the end. Entirely consumed with herself and her place in society, Volumnia raises her son to be ever-haughty and consumed with honor through battle. She itemizes those honors and describes “good report” as an effective substitute for a son lost to war. No wonder he’s such a tiger in combat; bloody death must seem preferable to life with her.

When the play moves on to its resolution, Volumnia acts wholly in character, and utterly unlike a decent mother, by making her rebel son bow to his enemies. Shakespeare gives Coriolanus a brief moment to register this fact:

"Thou art not honest; and the gods will plague thee,/That thou restrain'st from me the duty which/To a mother's part belongs." Volumnia plays one final mind game on her son at the conclusion of Coriolanus. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolanus.

O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But, for your son, – believe it, O, believe it,
Most dangerously you have with him prevail'd,
If not most mortal to him. [V.iii.82-89]

Though dramatically compelling, it’s a convoluted sequence in the way it sets up the final conflict. For me, it’s a reason for not regarding Coriolanus more highly; despite the bracing political argument and its profile of a flawed but compelling and even surprisingly sympathetic title character, this just isn’t that engaging or credible as a drama.

The finale comes across abrupt and flat-footed in this way; we see Coriolanus undone one last time by his inability to curb his tongue, yet we know from what we observed that his fate was sealed long before he opened his mouth. In fact, he just finished telling Volumnia the same thing. There is a sense of diminishing returns in this play; each act feels less than the act before. Other Shakespeare plays build; this recedes.

Why then does the play still pack a punch for me? I do enjoy the set-up, and I find the protagonist’s interactions with Menenius and Volumnia to be consistently captivating. I also like the way Shakespeare works in a sense of Coriolanus’ flawed nobility; late in the first act, there’s an interlude when he asks after a resident of the enemy city who took him in at a moment of crisis. He wants to be sure the fellow is well-cared-for. Then, when asked the fellow’s name, Coriolanus forgets it.

The episode is not readdressed; was this to have been a plot point that Shakespeare dropped? More likely, it was meant as a signal of a decent but flawed nature. Coriolanus doesn’t really care about other people enough to do right by them even when the impulse is there.

Blame Mama? Blame his own self-exulted sense of place? I prefer to credit Shakespeare for inserting a note of genuine criticism amid all the false carping his hero endures. The Bard always makes one think.