18

The shaping of Coriolanus: Dionysius, Plutarch and Shakespeare

Coriolanus offers a unique opportunity to trace the moulding of a Shakespearian character and plot. It is not just that we can trace his adaptations of Plutarch with particular precision, though it is true that he stays nearer to his Plutarchan original here than in the other Roman plays: many of the verbal echoes are very close, especially at the tensest moments – Coriolanus’ speech to Aufidius in IV.v, Volumnia’s decisive harangue in V.iii – and there are also notable similarities in conception. But there is more. Plutarch’s own methods are particularly clear, for – most unusually for him – he owes virtually all his material to a single source, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and we can trace Plutarch’s own transformations in detail. This was done in 1963 in a seminal article by Donald Russell;¹ the implications for Shakespeare are worth tracing. Time and again we find Shakespeare – of course unconsciously, for he surely did not know Dionysius – responding to and developing those features which are Plutarch’s own, where Plutarch has improved on his source through his own creative reinterpretation. There is a continuous process here, with Plutarch taking the dramatic reshaping and character-moulding half-way, and Shakespeare finishing the task.

Some of this is no surprise. Plutarch is a highly dramatic writer, with strong visual scenes and tense personal encounters, and many of his scenes might already seem shaped for the theatre. Menenius and the commons, Martius and Cominius after Corioles, the candidature for the consulship, the trial, the arrival at Aufidius’ house, and particularly the final collapse before the women’s embassy – all have a peculiar tautness and sharpness of focus, and all transposed readily for the stage. Plutarch also has the problem of shaping a biography from the sprawling historical narrative of Dionysius, where the Coriolanus story spreads over three books; of course he develops a stronger sense of the man’s character and uses this to unify the material, whereas Dionysius allowed Coriolanus’ story to be only one part, though a vital one, of a wider historical theme.² Some of Plutarch’s favourite devices for smoothing narrative, such as temporal compression and conflation of similar items,³ are similar to Shakespeare’s; it is natural that the events, which take years in Dionysius, are compressed to seem a matter of months in Plutarch, and the important political sequence takes place on a single day in Shakespeare.

Still, even such routine matters often have further implications. It is Plutarch, we shall see, who turns this into a tragedy of anger, and Shakespeare takes that over; yet the anger is different. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus typically loses control. His determination to act ‘mildly’ in the trial collapses as swiftly as his self restraint with Aufidius in the final scene. That suits Shakespeare’s even more rapid development of the plot. The glory of Corioles, the immediate rebuff in the elections, and now this swift further humiliation: no wonder control is hard to keep. Plutarch’s Coriolanus is not so much of a temper-loser. He is discomfited in the trial, thrown by the unexpected twist the accusations take, but he is not so enraged. His distinctive anger comes later as he goes into exile: it is wrath rather than rage, long-breeding, concealed, particularly dangerous, and Plutarch makes the point explicit (21 = Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 525–6:⁴ below, p. 399). Achilles’ wrath in the Iliad is hinted, certainly for Plutarch and probably for Shakespeare too;⁵ but the anger we become used to in Shakespeare is the anger of Iliad 1, with a man cheated of his proper recognition and enraged beyond measure by sudden humiliation. In Plutarch it is the later, more stable and brooding wrath, as Achilles lingers in his tent, torn and agonized. And when Shakespeare’s rage has to develop in a similar way, once Coriolanus has left Rome and his anger has to stand the test of time, we ask more questions about whether he will be able to sustain it when the final pressure comes.

Elsewhere, too, apparently routine matters can illuminate fundamental issues of the two texts. A recurrent theme will be the manner in which Shakespeare, even as he transforms Plutarch in so many ways, does so to develop Plutarch’s own themes.

First scenes: Menenius and the commons

In Dionysius the Menenius episode is separate: his fable is inspired by the secession of the plebs which led to the tribunate. True, that fable (6.83–7) is delivered shortly before Corioles and Martius’ first appearance (6.92); but for the moment we hear only of Martius’ valour, not of his political intransigence, and there is no contrast between the two men’s political styles. It is not till 7.21 that Martius the intransigent appears, and by then Menenius is dead. His obituary rounds off Book 6 (6.96): that is a prominent position, and Menenius’ simple moralism doubtless has a wider paradigmatic role for the Struggle of the Orders.⁶ But this is some way from the sharp and particular contrast with Coriolanus which Plutarch and Shakespeare develop.

Plutarch integrates Menenius into Coriolanus’ story, but does not take it far. Martius is not closely involved in the secession which evokes Menenius’ fable: he only expresses fears of the revolutionary consequences, then disapproves, with some nobility of temper, of the concessions which the aristocrats grant (5–7 = NDS 510–11). Menenius’ style, addressing the commons in their own language, simply sets a model against which Martius’ later inflammatory manner can be gauged.

It is Shakespeare who keeps Menenius alive for the whole episode, and develops the hints which Plutarch gave.⁷ In I.i Menenius’ capacity to interact with the commons is captured not merely by his earthy style, but also by the constant interruptions from plebeians and his skilful playing off them; the contrast is sharpened by bringing Martius more strongly into this scene, and immediately developing the impatient, cursing flood of his rhetoric – so impatient of ‘proverbs’, I.i.203, when Menenius had been so proverbial himself. That sets the tone for those later scenes when Menenius’ moderating manner is at odds with Coriolanus’ wrath. But the contrast is not morally straightforward. Whereas Plutarch’s Menenius seems to provide a clear-cut positive example, Shakespeare leaves a more equivocal figure. ‘You slander,’ he claims at I.i.74–6, ‘The helms o’th’state, who care for you like fathers, When you curse them as enemies’. We already sense that this is an over-bland view; and that Menenius slips into comforting father-imagery a little too readily.⁸ Is he not too much of the ready diplomat, knowing like the tribunes how easily the commons can be led, if only one gets the style right? Is he not play-acting in precisely the way Coriolanus will later find so unbrookable? Plutarch introduces the contrast of the two men, but Shakespeare makes it thought-provoking.

Whatever the moral texturing, this systematic foiling makes it more interesting that Menenius shares, and makes clear he shares, so much of Martius’ intemperance with the commons; and he has the right style to say it to their faces (e.g. I.i.152–61, IV.vi.130–40: compare his tone with the tribunes in II.i). That reflects a wider contrast between Plutarch and Shakespeare. There is little to be said for Shakespeare’s commons, and Martius’ denunciations ring true: cowardly, petty, feckless, ready at the end to disown all the actions they earlier relished (IV.vi.141–59, V.iv.35–8). True, they are capable of a nobler response when treated nobly; true, the adroit tribunes are even more unlikeable; true, the patricians hardly convince as masters of paternal concern. But still one cannot call the moral scales evenly balanced, and they are indeed much less balanced than they were in Plutarch.⁹

That is interesting. Plutarch is normally sympathetic to elite causes; but not here. The first political issue in Plutarch centres on the usurers (5 = NDS 509), a question Shakespeare almost ignores, and here the commons clearly has the stronger case. The next disturbance centres on the patricians’ desire to send a detachment of plebeians to plague-stricken Velitrae (12–13 = NDS 515–17). The issues are more complex than that, but again one understands the plebeians’ indignation; and again Shakespeare almost ignores the issue.¹⁰ In Plutarch the commons’ initial response to Coriolanus’ consular candidature is one of respect, ‘thinking it would be a shame to them to deny and refuse the chiefest noble man of blood, and most worthy person of Rome, and specially him that had done so great service and good to the common wealth’ (14.1, cf. 15.1 = NDS 516–17): that is one of the few positive suggestions which Shakespeare takes over (II.iii init.). But when they change their minds in Plutarch, it is not because they are the mindless fodder for the manipulative tribunes as they are in that Shakespearian scene; the tribunes are prominent elsewhere in Plutarch but absent here, and the plebeians make up their own minds quite thoughtfully. Later they respond readily to a moderate gesture from the senate (18.1 = NDS 522), and they prevent the tribunes’ vindictiveness from going too far (18.4 = NDS 523). They certainly respond to Coriolanus’ own rage with rage of their own, and like him they confound battle and politics:

After declaration of the sentence, the people made such joy, as they had never rejoiced more for any battle they had won upon their enemies, they were so brave and lively, and went home so jocondly from the assembly, for triumph of this sentence.

(20.8 = NDS 525)

But Coriolanus has here set the tone, and they have followed. They can still take the lead, ahead of the senate, in their readiness to bring the conflict to an end (29 = NDS 533: below, p. 403).

In Dionysius the political rights and wrongs are of absorbing interest, though it is difficult to carry away a coherent picture of the text’s sympathies; but there are certainly some instances, as with the usurers (cf. 6.22), where the patricians are less clearly in the wrong in Dionysius than they will be in Plutarch. Plutarch has his own reasons for that. He pairs Coriolanus with Alcibiades. In Alcibiades the ordinary people again have some friendly and biddable features, though they can be a formidable enemy when roused: they have something of Alcibiades himself about them.¹¹ Coriolanus cannot manage his commons, ready though they can be to respond to his better features. Alcibiades is much more gifted, and has the political flair to mesh with his quirky and enterprising commons; but eventually he can manage them no better than Coriolanus can, and falls to just as certain a disaster. Coriolanus, the simpler first Life, sets the pattern, and Alcibiades plays a complex variation on it: I argued earlier that this is why Plutarch reverses the normal ordering of Greek and Roman Lives.¹²

Why, then, does Shakespeare’s text change the commons back to something less attractive, in a way which so many critics have found so gratingly offensive? There may well be reasons in the contemporary political background,¹³ or in Renaissance views of the mob, or even – however uncomfortably for moderns – in Shakespeare’s own sympathies: that ground has been well traversed by critics. But a simpler point, as Bradley in particular saw,¹⁴ concerns the texture of audience engagement with the hero. Plutarch, we noted, barely involves Martius in the first political exchanges. By the time the Life shows his political impatience, we have seen his better qualities in childhood and at Corioles, and can understand the faults without totally distancing ourselves from him. If we had Plutarch’s more reasonable commons in Shakespeare’s first scene, the emotional distancing from Martius might well be too great. We need not put this crudely in terms of a ‘sympathetic character’: Coriolanus’ grandeur defeats a simple view of sympathy. It is rather the sort of issue which the audience is encouraged to dwell on: not the rights or wrongs of the commons’ case, but the wisdom or folly of Martius’ style. The isolation which Shakespeare’s Martius finds is not one of political sympathies nor of personal affection: the patricians share his feelings about the commons, and their grief as he departs for exile is deep (IV.i). It concerns methods. He alone finds the institution of the tribunate hard to cope with; he alone cannot bend to a more blandly compromising style. It is because he is right about the commons’ faults that he becomes tragic, that correct insight turns to self-destruction.

Corioles

Plutarch turns Corioles into a more individual feat of Martius’ heroism. He makes the mass of the army initially reluctant to join Martius as he forces his way into the town (8.6 = NDS 512); Dionysius had rather stressed how many had followed him (6.92.5). Shakespeare takes this further, and presents Martius as more isolated still. Thus at I.iv.40 ff. Shakespeare has the commons follow Martius into the city only at the end of the scene, after he has achieved his heroic deeds. ‘Alone I did it’, he can claim in his final indignation (V.vi.116). In Plutarch it is after he is joined by his men that he does most of his glorious fighting. Shakespeare also takes Martius’ contempt for the common soldier further, for instance at I.iv.30 ff., I.v.1–8, and I.vi.42–4.

This is more than the regular exaggeration of the hero’s role, ready though both Plutarch and Shakespeare are to highlight their figure’s contribution. Both Plutarch and Shakespeare are concerned to prepare at Corioles for later counterpart scenes in civic life, scenes where Martius’ aggressiveness, impatience, and pride will be catastrophic rather than glorious. We have seen how Shakespeare, more suggestively than Plutarch, makes Coriolanus’ political isolation an important motif, and the commons more inglorious. It is in keeping with both themes that the common soldiers at Corioles are initially more shameful, and need more inspiration before they respond to his lead.

Shakespeare seizes on another Plutarchan touch to point the dangerous parallels between Martius on campaign and in the forum.¹⁵ When the commons turn to plunder, Plutarch’s Martius vents his indignation in a ‘shout’ (9.1 = NDS 512): there was nothing of that in Dionysius. We have heard already of the man’s massive war-shout, where Plutarch had noted, most intrusively, that the elder Cato had demanded that the good soldier should be ‘not only terrible, and fierce to lay about him, but to make the enemy afeared with the sound of his voice and grimness of his countenance’ (8.3 = NDS 512). Those shouts are duly seen to good effect in the fighting itself (8.3, 8.5 = NDS 512), but those indignant shouts at the plunder offer a precursor of the political struggles. Cato’s language will be echoed in Plutarch’s trial-scene at 18.3 = NDS 522, when Coriolanus refused to display any humility but ‘gave himself in his words to thunder, and look therewithall so grimly, as if he made no reckoning of the matter’ (the echo is even closer in the Greek). At Corioles, all is well: as so often, Coriolanus is answered in kind, and the ‘marvellous great shout’ which greets him is one of acclaim (11.1, cf. 9.5, 10.6 = NDS 515, 513, 515). But enough has been done to create unease for the future. It will not be only Coriolanus’ ‘shouts’ which recur. For Plutarch, ‘shouting’ typifies the demagogue;¹⁶ and the tribunes will duly ‘shout’ and ‘cry’ in ways which Coriolanus will find trickier to handle (13.1, 17.3 = NDS 516–17, 521).

Shakespeare again takes many of these hints, and uses them to point a similar pattern. Here too Martius is greeted in kind. When he curses the rabble, they sullenly reject his appeal (I.iv.46–9); after he addresses them nobly, they follow him willingly (I.vi.66–85). That cursing of the commons in I.iv recalls his initial cursing speech in I.i, and we will hear much in a similar vein later; in Shakespeare too he ‘shouts’ (stage-direction at I.vi.24), and we hear from Lartius of ‘the thunder-like percussion of thy sounds’ (I.iv.61). Shakespeare combines it with another effective theatrical gesture, the throwing of caps into the air; we have already heard of that, on Martius’ own lips, as the commons reacted with joy to the appointment of the tribunes (I.i.210–12). Now it is Martius himself who is greeted thus. When the men do respond to his lead, ‘they all shout and wave their swords, take him up in their arms, and cast up their caps’ (stage-direction at I.vi.75); then, when he refuses ‘a bribe to pay my sword’ (so very different from their own concern for material profit), ‘they all cry “Martius! Martius!”, cast up their caps and lances’ (stage-direction at I.ix.40); as he returns, so he thinks to the consulship, ‘the commons made a shower and thunder with their caps and shouts’ (II.i.258–9). This too will not last, and as he goes magnificently into exile the plebeians cry ‘Our enemy is banished, he is gone! Hoo-oo!’: They all shout, and throw up their caps (stage-direction at III.iii.137; recalled by Menenius at IV.iv.132–3). Shakespeare borrows both the shouting and the pattern which it points, as the commons respond in kind to the different sorts of lead, in battle and in politics, which Coriolanus gives.

The consulship

Dionysius does not make much of the consulship. For him, the rift centres on corn. Coriolanus’ electoral rebuff is introduced only in an initial retrospect, explaining why his opposition was so much more open and violent than that of his fellows.

For he had stood for the consulship at the last election with the support of the patricians, and the commons had opposed him and prevented his election. They were cautious of the man’s brilliance and his audacity, fearing that these qualities would lead him to try to overthrow the tribunate; and they were particularly nervous because of the unprecedented enthusiasm shown by the patricians for his election.

(7.21.2)

Plutarch expands this to have the people initially willing to elect him (14.1 = NDS 517–18), but then their minds are turned by his tumultuous and contemptuous arrival in the forum on election day, accompanied by his patrician supporters (15.2, cf. 15.5–6 = NDS 518, 519). So Plutarch builds a real, particular incident from what in Dionysius is merely the fear of patrician support: it is only later, during the corn disputes, that we hear in Dionysius of these arrogant young patricians who escorted Coriolanus everywhere (7.21.3). Plutarch also introduces the question of Coriolanus’ wounds (14.2, 15.1 = NDS 518), though there is no hint of any reluctance to show them.¹⁷ He is borrowing here from a later passage in Dionysius, where Coriolanus readily shows off his scars during his trial (7.62.3). The real interest of the episode, though, comes in Coriolanus’ response to his failure: again Plutarch goes beyond Dionysius, who simply has ‘the man was stirred by anger at this outrage...’. Plutarch is here moved to his extended discussion of the military character and its political limitations (15.4–5 = NDS 519: below, p. 401); he also plays with the effect of those other extreme young aristocrats (15.6 = NDS 519), the way their constant company and encouragement must have stirred up the man’s passions. But this still does not provoke the decisive rift with the commons. That comes with his fiery speech on the corn issue (16 = NDS 520–1), which brings in the deftly calculating tribunes.

For Shakespeare the consulship is more important still, and he transfers some incidents from the grain dispute, especially the manipulative tribunes. It is now the consulship, not the grain, which provokes Coriolanus’ decisive outburst. In one sense this compression may make the tribunes’ and commons’ opposition more reprehensible, concerned as they now are only with the personal issue of Coriolanus’ honour;¹⁸ but for Plutarch too the case against Coriolanus is fundamentally based on his ferocious contempt for the tribunes’ power (17.4), and here he and Shakespeare are at one. Nor are the grain issues ignored by Shakespeare, for much of this material is transplanted to I.i,¹⁹ where Martius’ impatience with the commons’ material demands is made very clear.

It is better to ask why the consulship provides so appropriate a focus for Coriolanus’ anger in both Plutarch and Shakespeare; and in each case it will surely be because it centres on merits, honours, and deserts. Dionysius, concerned with the leading themes of Rome as a whole, can afford to concentrate on the grain issue and the interminable constitutional complexities of the tribunate. Plutarch’s focus on the consulship gives a stronger concentration on Coriolanus himself, but there is more to it than mere biographical focusing. For Plutarch makes questions of reciprocity central: the response in kind to the man’s leadership at Corioles, and the more wrathful response in kind which follows in politics; his determination to pay out Rome for its ingratitude; the agonizing complexity when that reciprocity clashes with the reciprocal devotion he owes to his mother. No wonder that Plutarch emphasizes his determination to receive the recognition he has earned, and then to pay the commons back for their humiliation. No wonder, either, that Shakespeare welcomes something of that emphasis, even though he does not develop the reciprocity theme so insistently as Plutarch.²⁰ For his Coriolanus, too, has a strong sense of earning. These are the honours he has earned: it is indeed the feeling that the commons expect grain when they have not earned it, when their cowardice gives them no right to expect anything, which helps to unify his expectations for himself with his contempt for the feckless plebeians.

There remains the striking difference between Plutarch and Shakespeare: the wounds. Plutarch’s Coriolanus has no difficulty in showing them. That indeed gives a strong visual and emblematic focus to his feeling of desert, and this is doubtless why Plutarch transferred the motif from its later setting in Dionysius. It is Shakespeare who develops the reluctance, and makes it so extraordinarily expressive. We naturally think of this as modesty;²¹ it has more to do with pride. Plutarch raised the issue why the Romans insist on their candidates wearing a special white gown: perhaps it was to allow them to show any wounds, but perhaps it was also to show them humble and deferential to the commons (14.2 = NDS 518) – something that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus could hardly brook. But the pride is not just before the commons. He cannot bear to hear his ‘nothings monstered’ even among his peers (II.ii.76), and the ‘monster’ imagery ties into a more pervasive motif. It would be a travesty to present these wounds in this context, as if they were gained for personal advancement rather than for his country, just as it would be a travesty to allow the commons to develop its own ‘monstrous’ qualities as the many-headed ‘Hydra’ (III.i.93, cf. II.iii.17, IV.i.1–2). Doubtless these are two elements of the same prideful thing: he simply cannot understand the deficiencies which lead the plebeians to regard such courage as very remarkable. That, for him, is a mark of their insensitivity to genuine honour.

Something of this theme is already there in Plutarch, but Shakespeare makes it suggestively different, just as he puts so much more emphasis on this ‘pride’; and that cannot be discussed without also considering Volumnia.

Volumnia

First, her name. Dionysius calls the mother Veturia and the wife Volumnia. Plutarch makes the mother Volumnia and the wife Vergilia. It is conceivable that the change was deliberate. For Plutarch and for his Latin-knowing audience, the virginal sound of ‘Vergilia’ might have seemed appropriate for the younger, deferential woman – what Dr Johnson called her ‘bridal modesty’. But it is hard to see any motive for abandoning ‘Veturia’, and, disappointing though it is, we should probably regard the change as a simple mistake. If, as Russell suggests,²² Plutarch wrote much of his work from memory, the slip is easier to understand.

Dionysius inevitably gives the mother a large role, and for twenty-five pages she dominates the final encounter. But that scene is largely unprepared. We can trace a drift towards the theme in the preceding episode, where the senatorial ambassadors dwell on the danger to Rome’s womenfolk and the miseries and perils of Coriolanus’ family (8.24.4–5, 25.1, 28.1–3), and Coriolanus thanks them for the care they have taken of the family (8.29.1). Earlier Dionysius had mentioned, but not elaborated, the scene of farewell (7.67: below, p. 399). That is not much. Dionysius’ mother is also a very different figure from the mighty Volumnia of Plutarch and Shakespeare. Compare, for instance, her reaction when asked to undertake the embassy. She begins with recollections of Coriolanus’ uncompromising words as he left; she wonders, rather conventionally, what words she might possibly say to him, and concludes

Nor should you be pressing us women to ask from him things which are not just in the eyes of mortals nor holy in the eyes of gods, but you should let us piteous creatures be, just as we have been cast low by fortune, and allow us to lie humiliated without suffering any further impropriety.

(8.42.2)

Contrast Plutarch’s version, ending in terms which breathe the majesty of Rome:

But yet the greatest grief of our heaped mishaps is to see our poor country brought to such extremity, that all hope of the safety and preservation thereof is now unfortunately cast upon us simple women: because we know not what account he will make of us, since he hath cast from him all care of his natural country and common weale, which heretofore he hath holden more dear and precious than either his mother, wife, or children. Notwithstanding, if ye think we can do good, we will willingly do what you will have us: bring us to him I pray you. For if we can not prevail, we may yet die at his feet, as humble suitors for the safety of our country.

(33.8–10, NDS 538)

Nor does Dionysius’ mother appeal to Coriolanus in anything like the same tones as in the later adaptations. She claims:

You have made me the most unfortunate of mothers. For what time has there been, since I brought you to manhood, which I could spend without grief or fear? When could I be of good cheer, seeing you launch war upon war, fight battle upon battle, suffer wound upon wound? Then, from the time you took up the public life of politics, what pleasure could I take on your account? That was when I was most miserable, seeing you in the middle of civic faction. Those very measures which brought you acclaim, when you were strong-spirited in fighting the plebeians on behalf of the aristocracy, filled me with fear, as I called to mind how mutable human life could be...

(8.51.4–52.1)

That is not Plutarch’s Volumnia, or Shakespeare’s: they would have been horrified if he had not been fighting war upon war and suffering wound upon wound; nor would they have timidly regretted his civic antagonisms.²³

Plutarch introduces Volumnia much earlier, and makes her explain something of her son’s character. Early in the Life, just after Martius’ first successes, Plutarch makes him exemplify the type stirred on by early fame:

Where contrariwise, the first honour that valiant minds do come unto, doth quicken up their appetite, hasting them forward as with force of wind, to enterprise things of high deserving praise. For they esteem, not to receive reward for service done, but rather take it for a remembrance and encouragement, to make them do better in time to come: and be ashamed also to cast their honour at their heels, not seeking to increase it still by like desert of worthy valiant deeds. This desire being bred in Martius, he strained still to pass his self in manliness: and being desirous to show a daily increase of his valiantness, his noble service did still advance his fame, bringing in spoils upon spoils from the enemy. Whereupon, the captains that came afterwards (for envy of them that went before) did contend who should most honour him, and who should bear most honourable testimony of his valiantness. In so much the Romans having many wars and battles in those days, Coriolanus was at them all: and there was not a battle fought, from whence he returned not without some reward of honour. And as for other, the only respect that made them valiant was they hoped to have honour: but touching Martius, the only thing that made him to love honour was the joy he saw his mother did take of him. For he thought nothing made him so happy and honourable, as that his mother might hear everybody praise and commend him, that she might always see him return with a crown upon his head, and that she might still embrace him with tears running down her cheeks for joy... Martius, thinking all due to his mother that had been also due to his father if he had lived, did not only content himself to rejoice and honour her, but at her desire took a wife also, by whom he had two children, and yet never left his mother’s house therefore.

(4 = NDS 507–8)

Very little of this is owed to Dionysius. He mentioned that Coriolanus was an orphan, but only in a passing mention in the mother’s speech (8.51.3): Plutarch’s main theme, that desire to please his mother as the mainspring of Coriolanus’ quest for honour, seems wholly his own construct: this is what Coriolanus needs to be if he is to be so susceptible to his mother’s final pleas. From Dionysius Plutarch also knew the scene where the mother and wife, together in the mother’s house (8.40.1), were persuaded to set out to the camp. This, clearly, is where the family lived, and that is the basis for Plutarch’s final remark that ‘he yet never left his mother’s house’. The further step, that it was at his mother’s desire that he took his wife, is again his own psychological reconstruction, as we saw in ch. 14 (p. 310). Mother and wife are clearly close, so of course Volumnia must have approved of Vergilia as a wife, and of course a man like this would allow his mother’s views to decide the matter.

That is pure Plutarch. We recognize the same sensibility that dwelt on, and often elaborated, other majestic Roman women: Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, or Porcia, Brutus’ wife (Gracch. 1, 8, 24, 40, Brut. 13, 23, 53); and perhaps particularly Octavia in Antony, where he went well beyond his sources in developing the grave Roman matron, representing Roman values just as Cleopatra represents those of the luxurious East.²⁴ For Plutarch, an important part of understanding Rome was understanding her great women.

This is recognisably also the Volumnia of Shakespeare, and the relationship of mother and son which is introduced at the outset:

FIRST CITIZEN:Though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his

country, he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud, which he is, even to

the altitude of his virtue.

(I.i.35–8)

Not the most definitive of verdicts, for this citizen is unfriendly, and the ‘for the country’ theme is not to be so lightly dismissed: but all three elements, patriotism, filiality, and pride, capture something central to the man.

Again, though, Shakespeare goes much further. Having introduced Volumnia so forcefully, Plutarch leaves her alone for most of the Life. We simply find wife and mother ‘weeping and shrieking out for sorrow’ (hardly the Shakespearian Volumnia) as he leaves them for exile (21 = NDS 526). In particular, Plutarch has no hint of the distance which we find between Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and his mother, visible in both candidature and trial. Volumnia’s response to the glory of Corioles is to think of the consulship (II.i.140–1), and the two view the prospect with different voices.

VOLUMNIA: I have lived

To see inherited my very wishes

And the buildings of my fancy. Only

There’s one thing wanting, which I doubt not but

Our Rome will cast upon thee.

CORIOLANUS:Know, good mother,

I had rather be their servant in my way

Than sway with them in theirs. (II.i.190–6)

Then it is Volumnia who persuades her son to submit to the humiliation of a trial, and speak mildly (III.ii). It is not that she herself has any better view of the commons:

CORIOLANUS:

I muse my mother

Does not approve me further, who was wont

To call them woollen vassals, things created

To buy and sell with groats, to show bare heads

In congregations, to yawn, be still and wonder,

When one but of my ordinance stood up

To speak of peace or war.

Enter Volumnia

I talk of you

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. (III.ii.7–18)

Volumnia has to press him to do something he finds unthinkable, to be ‘false to his nature’. The theatrical imagery (‘I play the man I am’) frequently recurs, and Coriolanus is not the man to play a part. She knows the way to speak to her soldierly son,²⁵ and draws the comparison with military ruses (III.ii.46–51, 59); even so Coriolanus has only to frame the prospect to find it impossible (III.ii.110–23, ‘I will not do’t’). It is only as Volumnia breaks away and admits failure that Coriolanus capitulates (III.ii.123–30): exactly the same rhythm²⁶ as we shall find in the Volscian camp at V.iii.172–82, ‘Come let us go’, when the prospect of breaking with his mother’s wish shatters Coriolanus’ resolve. The fragmentation of Coriolanus is achingly clear, so unwilling to be false, yet so uneasy at the prospect of his mother’s disapproval: that unease, indeed, was already apparent with that discomfited initial ‘I talk of you, Why did you wish me milder?’

In one sense this is most unplutarchan. There is no dissonance between mother and son in Plutarch, where Coriolanus is himself eager for honour after honour to please his mother. Shakespeare has transferred that ambition for honour from the son, leaving him more diffident, to the mother, at the same time making it something more crude and cross-grained:²⁷ she is uncompromising in ends and therefore compromises over means. We can now understand why Shakespeare introduces that reluctance to show the wounds. Volumnia never doubts that he must and will do so (II.i.141–2, ‘There will be large cicatrices to show the people, when he shall stand for his place’), and the wounds become emblematic of the rift between mother and son.

Yet this too is a development of a Plutarchan theme, and not merely in the sense that it further elaborates Plutarch’s own elaboration of Volumnia’s role. In the Volscian camp Plutarch too has a Coriolanus who has to choose and who cannot break with his mother, despite all the momentum of past actions which have brought him to this. Shakespeare introduces such a choice earlier, and as the embassy reaches the camp that makes us readier to suspect that, now as before, he will be unable to sustain his stance to the end. But that too is already the case in Plutarch, for the emotional intensity of their meeting prepares the ground decisively for Volumnia’s words (34.3–4 = NDS 538–9), and we can understand how they may be effective – though in both authors we cannot expect the issue to be easy. Shakespeare of course introduces so much more: the expressive kneelings, the emphasis on ‘nature’,²⁸ the even tauter use of silence.²⁹ But it is still the same rhythm, in a subtler and richer transfiguration.

Understanding Coriolanus

It was one of the most fundamental insights of Greek characterization that a hero’s faults and virtues are intimately related. The same qualities build and then destroy. That was true of Homer’s Achilles, of Oedipus, Ajax, Antigone, Medea; it was true of Herodotus’ Persia and Thucydides’ Athens; and it is certainly true of many of Plutarch’s heroes, his Caesar, his Antony, his Alcibiades, his Alexander, his Pompey.³⁰

It was even true of Dionysius’ Coriolanus. After the man’s death Dionysius summarizes his career (8.60–1). He emerges as a man of great spirit, of generosity, even of some political skill. As for his faults, he lacked graciousness, mildness, and the power to please or conciliate. But the decisive point was his uncompromising commitment to justice (δικαιοσύνη, τὰ δίκαια). ‘It was nothing else but that passion for exact and extreme justice which drove him from his country and deprived him of the enjoyment of all his other blessings.’ It prevented him from compromising in his dealings with the ordinary people at Rome; and it eventually destroyed him, because he felt he could not withdraw from the legal procedures among the Volscians, but had to submit to any punishment they might inflict according to their laws.

This emphasis on justice is not wholly unprepared by the preceding narrative,³¹ but it is still not what we should have expected. Only a few chapters earlier, for instance, Dionysius had put more stress on Coriolanus’ desire for ‘good reputation, the thing about which he cared most’ (8.54.3); earlier we had heard more of his ‘natural stubbornness’ (7.34.2). But this emphasis on Coriolanus’ rigid justice does cohere with the scene just before this summary, where his refusal to withdraw from the Volscian legal process offered his enemies the chance to destroy him. With a little straining, this summary extends the characteristic backwards, and relates his earlier career to the same trait; and we see how this taste for justice, something naturally seen as a virtue, turns out critical to his destruction.

Plutarch’s Coriolanus is very different. The stress on justice is still important, and indeed is developed to a wider concern with problematic reciprocity (above, pp. 393–4); but the central point has changed. For Plutarch it is his anger which drives him to such extremes.³² When Coriolanus bids farewell to his wife and mother, Dionysius presents the scene as a model of restraint. Coriolanus contrasted with the abandoned emotion of his followers and family, and ‘was not seen either to bewail or to lament his own fate or to say or do the least thing unworthy of his greatness of soul’ (7.67). Plutarch transforms the scene. Coriolanus’ apparent impassivity is still stressed, but Plutarch insists it belies the seething passions beneath:

Not that he did patiently bear and temper his good-hap, in respect of any reason he had, or by his quiet condition: but because he was so carried away with the vehemency of anger and desire of revenge, that he had no sense nor feeling of the hard state he was in, which the common people judge not to be sorrow, although in deed it be the very same. For when sorrow (as you would say) is set afire, then it is converted into spite and malice, and driveth away for that time all faintness of heart and natural fear. And this is the cause why the choleric man is so altered and mad in his actions, as a man set afire with a burning ague: for when a man’s heart is troubled within, his pulse will beat marvellous strongly.

(21.1–2 = NDS 525–6)

And this, surely, is also the way Shakespeare’s scene can and should be played (IV.i).³³ For all the apparent calmness of Coriolanus, there are hints of the rage to come, when this suppressed rage will be ‘set afire’:

While I remain above the ground you shall

Hear of me still, and never of me aught

But what is like me formerly. (IV.i.51–3)

This ‘lonely dragon’ (IV.i.30) is powerful yet.

Plutarch cares about understanding his heroes, not simply describing them: can he explain this depth of rage? Here Dionysius offered only clues. One promising theme Plutarch chose not to relate to this dominant trait, and that was the early orphanhood. On the contrary, Coriolanus’ case

....taught us by experience that orphanage bringeth many discommodities to a child, but doth not hinder him to become an honest man, and to excel in virtue among the common sort.

1.2 = NDS 505–6)

No, Plutarch goes on, the explanation for Coriolanus’ character is to be sought in a different aspect of his early background: it was a matter of his education.

This man also is a good proof to confirm some men’s opinions that a rare and excellent wit untaught doth bring forth many good and evil things together:³⁴ like as a fat soil bringeth forth herbs and weeds that lieth unmanured. For this Martius’ natural wit and great heart did marvellously stir up his courage, to do and attempt noble acts. But on the other side for lack of education he was so choleric and impatient that he would yield to no living creature: which made him churlish, uncivil, and altogether unfit for any man’s conversation.³⁵ Yet men marvelling much at his constancy, that he was never overcome with pleasure, nor money, and how he would endure easily all manner of pains and travails: thereupon they well liked and commended his stoutness and temperancy. But for all that, they could not be acquainted with him, as one citizen useth to be with another in the city. His behaviour was so unpleasant to them, by reason of a certain insolent and stern manner he had, which because it was too lordly was disliked. And to say truly, the greatest benefit that learning bringeth men unto, is this: that it teacheth men that be rude and rough of nature, by compass and rule of reason, to be civil and courteous, and to like better the mean state than the higher.

(1.3–5 = NDS 506)

Nor was it simply accident, or his mother’s choice, that he should be educated in this deficient way. It was a feature of the Roman values of the day.

Now in those days valiantness was honoured in Rome above all other virtues: which they called Virtus, by the name of virtue self, as including in that general name all other special virtues besides. So that Virtus in the Latin was as much as valiantness.

(1.6 = NDS 506)

Plutarch’s strong belief in the civilizing force of education is often seen elsewhere: it is important, for instance, in his Marius (esp. 2.3–4), in his Philopoemen (esp. 3–4), in his Marcellus (esp. 1.3–5). All of these were military men who failed to control their impetuosity or aggression in political life, and all suffered for it. This is not coincidence. These are not just cases of men who chance to have one merit (military skills) and one unrelated failure (lack of self-control), for it is again precisely the same features which mould the soldier and mar the politician.³⁶ That was the emphasis in that first chapter here, where those ‘marvelling at his constancy’ and other virtues were deeply offended when they found the same qualities recurring in his dealings with his fellow-citizens; that too is the theme of Plutarch’s most elaborate discussion of Coriolanus’ character, inserted at the point where his candidature has been rebuffed.

He was a man too full of passion and choler, and too much given to over self-will and opinion, as one of a high mind and great courage, that lacked the gravity and affability that is gotten with judgement of learning and reason, which only is to be looked for in a governor of state... For a man that will live in the world must needs have patience, which lusty bloods make but a mock at. So Martius being a stout man of nature, that never yielded in any respect, as one thinking that to overcome always, and to have the upper hand in all matters, was a token of magnanimity, and of no base and faint courage, which spitteth out anger from the most weak and passioned part of the heart, much like the matter of an impostume: went home to his house, full freighted with spite and malice against the people...

(15.4–5 = NDS 519)

Once more we see the stress on education: it is ‘judgement of learning and reason’ that might have given the right texture of ‘gravity and affability’. And once more we see precisely the qualities one needs in a soldier but not in the forum, a man ambitious ‘to overcome always, and to have the upper hand in all matters’.³⁷ We can recognize here the Shakespearian hero who also has been too ‘bred i’th’wars’ to be politically accommodating (III.i.318, cf. III.ii.81–4), who so catastrophically confuses battlefield and market-place, who thinks to pile corpses upon corpses here as well (I.i.195–8, cf. III.i.237–42). We recognize too a more elaborate psychological basis for the Shakespearian figure who cannot play a part or be false to himself; and who cannot therefore even play tricks on his hated Romans in the war, as his Plutarchan prototype had done (26, 27.5–6, Comparison with Alcibiades 41(2).4 = NDS 530–1, 545): there again Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a more extreme version of Plutarch’s original. He is one and the same in all his manifestations, a single-sided person.

For Plutarch this absence of civilizing education was a general truth of the society, not a particular point about Coriolanus, and a whole band of extreme patricians behaved just as badly (15, 17.1, 19.3–4 = NDS 518–19, 521, 524). Critics often say something similar about Shakespeare, making Coriolanus the quintessential Roman who embodies the faults of his society as a whole:³⁸ if they are right, this would be another example of Shakespeare taking further what Plutarch started. But perhaps that is too simple a view of Shakespeare. It is true that Martius can speak the same language as Titus Lartius, for instance, as he can never speak with the commons: witness their banter about the horse (I.iv. init.). (Not that everyone is so close to him: one often senses a coolness towards Cominius.) It is true, too, that the patricians largely share his view of the commons. But we have already seen (pp. 389–91) that Shakespeare’s focus rests largely on political style rather than sympathies, and that in this respect Coriolanus is much more isolated and less typical of his society. It is this inability to compromise, not the sense of martial honour, which invites explanation. It certainly bemuses many observers in the play itself. And this makes the understanding of Coriolanus a much more particular thing in Shakespeare than in Plutarch.

Shakespeare here takes up the approach which Plutarch rejected, linking the dominant trait to the circumstances of Coriolanus’ parenthood. True, the explanation Plutarch rejects is the absence of a father, whereas Shakespeare’s point is the presence of the strong mother.³⁹ The tones in which Shakespeare’s Volumnia curses the commons leave us in no doubt where Coriolanus got it from (e.g. I.iii.34–5, III.ii.7–12, 24, IV.ii); so do the gruesome tones in which she greets her son’s bloodshed (e.g. I.iii.1–17, 40–6, II.i.141–2), much more gruesome than anything in Plutarch;⁴⁰ and the complacent tones in which Volumnia and her friend Valeria contemplate the young Martius’ tearing of a butterfly (‘how he mammocked it!’, I.iii.58–66) make it clear what the domestic atmosphere must have been.

Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’dst it from me,

But owe thy pride thyself. (III.ii.128–9)

So Volumnia chides him, at the first crucial moment when she turns away from her pleas, and puts him under unbearable pressure. But that raises the further question: can such valiantness, such contempt for the ordinary, such a taste for honour really be imbibed without some pride as well? She seems to have tried, too, to train him in bearing fortune’s greater blows with restraint and calculation:

CORIOLANUS:You were used

To say extremities was the trier of spirits;

That common chances common men could bear;

That when the sea was calm all boats alike

Showed mastership in floating; fortune’s blows

When most struck home, being gentle wounded craves

A noble cunning. You were used to load me

With precepts that would make invincible

The heart that conned them. (IV.i.3–11)

But can such a military temper coexist with a peacetime ‘noble cunning’? In many ways it is Volumnia, not Coriolanus, who combines the barely compatible. We can understand how difficult the man will find it to live up to all her precepts at once, just as we also sense how impossible he will find it to prove untrue to so strong, and so basically similar, a character.

Those words are spoken by Coriolanus as he goes into exile. He has never yet been able to adopt a ‘noble cunning’. Now he is going to try, as a means of entering Antium. He has hated wearing the candidate’s robe, and despised playing parts; now at Antium ‘Enter Coriolanus in mean apparel, disguised and muffled’ (stage-direction at IV.iv.1). Will he be able to fare better here? The soliloquy he utters on the route – ‘Oh world, thy slippery turns!’ (IV.iv.12–26) – reminds one of Ajax’s great speech in Sophocles (646–92), where Ajax resolves on suicide but in terms which those closest to him misunderstand. Ajax reflects on a world of shifting friendships and changing roles, a world which those who love him misinterpret him as accepting; but, for Ajax as for Coriolanus, this is a world in which the audience suspect he will have no comfortable place.

Mirrorings: Antium and Rome

It is not just the commons who respond to Plutarch’s Coriolanus in kind. Once Coriolanus invades and the commons wish to make peace, the senators are so outraged at his betrayal that they resist. Plutarch wonders why. Perhaps it was their ‘self-will to be contrary to the people’s desire’; or their determination that ‘Martius should not return through the grace and favour of the people’;⁴¹ or because they ‘were thoroughly angry and offended’ by his attacking the whole state when only a few had offended him (29 = NDS 533). Contentiousness, petty factionalism, anger: all these reasons suggest that the senate too had caught Coriolanus’ tone. And wherever Coriolanus turns, he now finds, or moulds, people like himself: the Volscians, whose recent defeats had increased their ‘malice and desire.to be revenged of the Romans’ (21.6 = NDS 526); and Aufidius,⁴² whose desire for revenge and ‘greatness of mind’ (phronema, 22.3 = NDS 527) again recalls language often used of Coriolanus himself (e.g. ‘as of a high mind and great courage’, 15.4 = NDS 519; cf. 13.4, 18.2 = NDS 517, 522). It is this universal aggressiveness, irascibility, and pride which create a world in which Coriolanus’ own passions can wreak such shattering consequences.

Shakespeare again develops much of this. Well can Menenius criticize the tribunes for their ‘pride’, for instance (II.i.23–42). The commons too have their own pride (or so at least Martius sees it, I.i.168); and several critics have suggested that Coriolanus’ bitterness against the commons is intensified by a sense in which he sees some of his own worst qualities in them.⁴³ But most interesting is his treatment of Aufidius. There is a crude sense here too in which the two mirror one another, as each state’s great champion; that, perhaps, is how Coriolanus himself sees him, and that is what stimulated his initial hopes that Aufidius might take him in.⁴⁴ Aufidius’ initial welcoming speech to Coriolanus, rich in homoerotic suggestions, again suggests the greeting of a twin self. Most interestingly, his chilling use of nuptial imagery recalls not only Coriolanus’ language, but Volumnia’s too:

AUFIDIUS:Know thou first

I loved the maid I married; never man

Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,

Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart

Than when I first my wedded mistress saw

Bestride my threshold. (IV.v.116–21)

Compare both:

Martius (to Cominius): O, let me clip ye

In arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart

As merry as when our nuptial day was done,

And tapers burned to bedward. (I.vi.29–32)

and:

VOLUMNIA: If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in

that absence wherein he won honour than in the embracements of

his bed where he would show most love. (I.iii.2–5)

For Coriolanus’ ears, his mother’s tones are an even more telling way of mimicking his inmost being.

But there is more to Aufidius, and by this stage of Shakespeare’s play we know it even if Coriolanus does not. Dionysius had delayed the mention of Aufidius’ envy till very late (8.57), after Coriolanus’ collapse before the women. Plutarch moves the theme earlier, introducing it just before Volumnia’s final plea (31.1–2 = NDS 534, building on the earlier hostility of 22.2 = NDS 526–7). Shakespeare again takes this further, introducing Aufidius’ animosity at the very beginning (I.i.226–30, I.ii esp. 34–6, I.viii, I.x). In Plutarch we therefore have a sense of the forces gathering against Coriolanus even as he gives in to his mother’s pleas, forces which will eventually destroy him; in Shakespeare we know this even earlier, before Coriolanus turns to Antium and Aufidius. We have been given a hint of what Aufidius’ hospitality will mean:

 Where I find him, were it

At home upon my brother’s guard, even there,

Against the hospitable canon, would

I Wash my fierce hand in’s heart. (I.x.24–7)

An alter ego for Coriolanus? Hardly! The audience may admittedly at first be unclear what to make of that mimicking of a second self in IV.v,⁴⁵ but they at least know it may be a manipulative ruse. A scene or so after his welcome, Aufidius’ time-biding and plotting are very clear:

 When, Caius, Rome is thine,

Thou art poor’st of all; then shortly art thou mine. (IV.vii.56–7).

Aufidius finds role-playing far truer to his nature, and it is he, not Coriolanus, who has a nature in tune with Volumnia’s advocation of ‘a noble cunning’ (IV.i.9).

The end comes amongst the Volscians, and the way Plutarch’s Volscians call Coriolanus to account (39 = NDS 543–4) recalls many of his troubles in Rome, particularly the trial. Here once again, his popular enemies in Plutarch feel some ‘reverence’ for him (aidos, 39.5 ~ 15.1, 18.3 = NDS 543 ~ 518, 522); here once again he agrees to stand trial (the language is similar, 39.3 ~ 20.2 = NDS 543 ~ 524). But here again the deft politicians are too adept for him, with their shouts and their accusations:

...those that were of the conspiracy began to cry out that he was not to be heard, nor that they would not suffer a traitor to usurp tyrannical power over the tribe of the Volsces, who would not yield up his estate and authority.

(39.8 = NDS 543)

So now it is the Volscians, not merely Romans, who regard him as a traitor; again the charge is one of tyranny, as it had been at Rome (20 = NDS 524), and this time it is decisive. But the underlying reason is that ‘envy’ of his rivals, especially Aufidius, that envy which even in Plutarch we have known for some time. This again is the counterpart of something we saw at Rome, where the envy began with his peers (2.2, 10.7–8 = NDS 506–7, 515), then seeped down to the commons (13.6 = NDS 517). And all this is again a great improvement on Dionysius.⁴⁶

This recall of earlier scenes and themes is appropriate for a conclusion: we sense the ring being completed. But the tragic suggestions go deeper. By now Coriolanus has relented, and wants only peace between the two peoples. But the passions have gone too far. Others have always followed his political tone: now he is trapped by the forces he has himself unleashed, and a version of his own past comes back to destroy him, while the lesser man survives.

Shakespeare’s end again takes the themes further. Once more we have the similar rhythm, the deft conspirators, the hostile mob; Coriolanus loses his self-control, in the way that Shakespeare’s figure has so often done before; and, here as in Rome, his own outburst of anger stimulates a similar anger among the commons. Again as so often in Rome, his temper breaks with the accusations that penetrate closest to the truth of his greatness. Here as there, the charge of treachery is one he cannot bear: all he has done, we so often have heard, was ‘for his country’. Or, as the citizen had suggested in the play’s first minutes, was it rather ‘to please his mother’ (I.i.37, above, pp. 396–7]? Now, memorably, it is the ‘boy of tears’ gibe that shatters any mild resolve.

In Plutarch it was the Roman factionalism which was recalled. Shakespeare adds a further recollection, that of Coriolanus’ military greatness. The scene is Corioles itself, not Plutarch’s Antium, and Coriolanus is slain on the ground which earned his name. Almost his last words are to recall that glorious ‘fluttering’ of the Volscians (V.vi.114–17). When Aufidius has killed him, he stands on his corpse (V.vi.131), and this recalls, but poignantly reverses, Volumnia’s bloody vision in her first scene:

He’ll beat Aufidius’ head below his knee

And tread upon his neck. (I.iii.47–8)

That vision was inspired by Coriolanus’ greatness; and there are other words of Volumnia we recall as well, her image of her son treading on her womb (V.iii.122–4, echoed by Vergilia and the boy). Once again one penetrates Coriolanus’ essence by hearing his mother’s words, not his own.⁴⁷

So glory, not merely faction, is terminally recalled. That is not Plutarchan – or, rather, not Plutarchan here. For Shakespeare has adopted something which is elsewhere one of Plutarch’s favourite techniques. Marcellus’ final rashness (Marc. 28) recalls the glorious earlier monomachies (esp. 2.1, 7); Pelopidas’ death, and the posthumous vengeance, recall some details of the capture of the Cadmeia (Pel. 8, 32, and 35). Lucullus ends on the note of his brother’s affection, one of the Life’s more uplifting themes; there is also a hint there of homosexual affections (he went mad when a freedman tried to win his affections with a love potion), and these echo the Chaeronea affair which he handled so well at the beginning of the pair (Luc. 43, Cim. 2).⁴⁸ Solon at the end ventures into the marketplace to denounce Peisistratus just as he did earlier to deliver his inspiring poem on Salamis (Sol. 8.2, 30.6). Antony meets his death in Alexandria, the city where he began his military career as a glamorous young cavalryman (Ant. 3). Even as Shakespeare here outdoes Plutarch in thematic intricacy, he does so in a distinctively Plutarchan way.

Conclusion

Plutarch pairs Coriolanus with Alcibiades, and most critics would think Alcibiades the greater work, wider-ranging, more skilfully textured, more thought-provoking. In comparison with Alcibiades, Coriolanus remains a caricature. Yet one can still understand why Shakespeare preferred to adopt Coriolanus, leaving Alcibiades for very selective exploitation in Timon of Athens; and that is not merely because Coriolanus is already so theatrical, already so unified. In Alcibiades we find a hero with charm and style, someone who meshes and interacts with his countrymen in a range of subtle ways. In Coriolanus, with the single exception of Corioles, the hero does not interact with his countrymen, he clashes and confronts; he does not speak with them or even (Menenius-like) speak their own language, he shouts at them and past them; he feels himself misunderstood and rejected by people who ought to be in his debt; he is a lone figure facing an alien world. Such a figure would naturally attract Shakespeare’s tragic sensibility; one need only think of Richard III and King Lear. But it embodies a tragic figure who goes further back, to Sophocles’ Ajax and beyond him to Homer’s Achilles. Coriolanus represents Plutarch’s version of this classical figure; and the chilling starkness with which the lines are drawn, less subtle and blurred than those which suit an accommodating charmer like Alcibiades, remains central to the figure’s absorbing power.

The affinity between Plutarch’s technique and Shakespeare’s suggests a further reflection. It may be no more than a question of a similar artistic sensibility, responding to the same elements and detecting the same tragic potential. But should we go further, as Judith Mossman does,⁴⁹ and sense Plutarch’s tastes helping to mould Shakespeare’s sensibility as well as chancing to prefigure it? That distinctively Greek stress on the figure who is built and destroyed by the same traits; that strongly unified character, whose different aspects cohere in so integrated yet catastrophic a way; that insight into the trap laid for a calmed soul by his own more turbulent past. All these themes are easy to find in the tragedies and histories: how much has Shakespeare learned from his (doubtless long-standing) immersion in Plutarch? Are we here touching the shaping of Shakespeare himself, not just of Coriolanus? Such a question is for mere Plutarchans to ask and for Shakespearians to discuss. But even Plutarchans would be interested in the answer.

Notes

¹ Russell 1963.

² A theme which is predominantly concerned with the strengths and weaknesses of the infant Roman Republic, as it copes with the first stages of the Struggle of the Orders. Some of Dionysius’ own thematic is not unsubtle. Gabba 1991, 81, 84, suggests that Dionysius elaborated Coriolanus in implied contrast with Thucydides’ paradigmatic account of the faction at Corcyra (3.82–4). Greek faction was bloody and catastrophic, its Roman counterpart was resolved peaceably: Dionysius makes the point explicit at 7.66.5. Gabba understates the Roman political frailties as well as strengths which Dionysius’ narrative exposes, but the implied contrast with Thucydides remains an interesting and plausible suggestion.

³ This is traced for Coriolanus by Russell 1963. I explore the use of these techniques in other Lives in ch. 4, esp. pp. 91–6.

⁴ On the relation of this wrath to the way Plutarch treats anger elsewhere, especially in On Controlling Anger, see Duff 1999, 212–13 and Roskam and Verdegem, forthcoming. – In this chapter Plutarch references are given both to the Teubner edition and to North’s translation, as printed in G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. V (London and New York, 1964: henceforth NDS). I have modernized North’s spelling and punctuation.

⁵ At least in the rather cruder and more arrogant version of Achilles Shakespeare had recreated for Troilus and Cressida. On the importance of the Achilles paradigm cf. Brower 1971, esp. 29–83, 354–81; Miola 1983, 197–8. Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Iliad itself is problematic: for recent discussion cf. Martindale and Martindale 1990, 91–120, arguing that for Troilus and Cressida he knew at least Chapman’s Seven Books of 1598 (Books 1–2, 7–11); if so he would surely have delved in Latin or French translations, or talked with more learned friends, to discover how it all went on. – To stress Achilles is not to reject the importance of Virgil’s Turnus, as argued by Velz 1983. In Virgil Turnus himself often intertextually suggests Achilles, so the suggestions are inextricably interconnected. – For Plutarch’s knowledge and exploitation of Homer see now Alexiou 2000, esp. 59, 65, on Coriolanus and 60–1 for his use of Achilles elsewhere; on this latter theme cf. also Mossman 1988 on Achillean elements in Alexander and 1992 on those in Pyrrhus.

⁶ As it does in Livy 2.32.8–12, which Shakespeare also probably knew (NDS 497–8). The juxtaposition with Coriolanus is there more suggestive, but Livy treats Coriolanus’ story as only one phase in the widening rifts, immediately followed by Sp. Cassius’ popular counterpart (2.41). Livy’s Menenius is a foil for more than Coriolanus. – Barton 1985 argues that Shakespeare draws on a wider reading of Livy and owes to him the conception of Roman historical change, that change which Coriolanus is resisting. But there is nothing here which cannot be inspired by the Lives.

⁷ He may well have known Menenius’ speech from other sources as well: it was a Renaissance commonplace. Cf. NDS 459, 551–2; Gurr 1975; Muir 1977, 238–9; Martindale and Martindale 1990, 150–1; Bliss 2000, 12–13. Morwood 1998 interestingly links Menenius’ soothing performance in Shakespeare with the first simile of Virgil’s Aeneid, where an authoritative statesman quells an unruly mob (Aen. 1.148–53). Morwood wonders if Virgil has the historical Menenius in mind; if there is a link (and the similarities seem less close to me than to Morwood), we might also wonder if Shakespeare is evoking Virgil. If so, the differences would be as expressive as the similarities: Virgil’s statesman cows the mob into respectful silence (silent arrectisque auribus astant, ‘they grow quiet, and listen with ears pricked’), and he talks to them; Shakespeare’s equivalent talks with them, and they talk back. – Cf. also above, p. 343, on the way Plutarch and Shakespeare contrast Menenius and Coriolanus in their rhetorical style.

⁸ Just as he does at the end, in his father-like (V.i.3, ii.67, iii.10) embassy to Coriolanus. If Shakespeare’s knowledge of Homer is conceded (n. 5), then new significance comes to this fatherliness. Priam’s mission to Achilles in Iliad 24, where Achilles gazes on Priam and sees his own father Peleus, becomes a suggestive paradigm, and the abrupt collapse of Menenius’ equivalent more pathetic. But a father-like appeal has not the power of a genuine mother’s. That, it seems, Menenius cannot grasp (V.iv init.). His ‘he had not dined’ (V.i.51) also trivializes expressively, and in a way which is over-complacent about his own diplomatic deftness. This recurrent food-register (also at IV.ii.48–51) is interesting, especially as his fable of the belly is delivered tactlessly to famished men – another unplutarchan touch, for in Plutarch the issue is not grain but representation. Here ‘[h]e thinks of man as ruled by his stomach’, Cantor 1976, 31; cf. Honigmann 1976, 175–81, and especially Hale 1971 on the failure of the analogy to reflect or direct reality. As Honigmann implies (179), he should be played by a visibly well-fed actor.

⁹ As MacCallum 1910, 518–48, brought out: his thorough discussion is still useful. The divergence from Plutarch should be a difficulty for those who make Shakespeare’s presentation sympathetic to the people (e.g. Muir 1979, 172–3, who oddly claims that ‘the alterations he made in Plutarch’s account have the effect of presenting us with a more favourable idea of the citizens’, and especially Patterson 1989, 120–53).

¹⁰ He borrows a phrase from it for Coriolanus’ gleeful reaction to a Volscian attack: ‘I am glad on’t. Then we shall ha’ means to vent Our musty superfluity’ (I.i.223–4, cf. Cor. 12.5 = NDS 516).

¹¹ Cf. above, pp. 125–8: the demos is more versatile and less grim in Alcibiades than in the parallel narrative in Nicias.

¹² pp. 357–9. The simpler view is that of Russell 1966a, 38 n. 8 = Scardigli 1995, 192 n. 8, pointing to Coriolanus’ chronological priority: cf. Demosthenes 3.5, ‘let us discuss the older figure first’. But that does not explain the other two pairs where the Roman comes first, Aemilius–Timoleon and Sertorius–Eumenes. Cf. p. 362 n. 33.

¹³ On this see above, pp. 254 and 263 n. 12, and works cited there, especially George 2000.

¹⁴ Bradley 1911–12, 460–2.

¹⁵ More on this at pp. 342–3.

¹⁶ Cf. p. 224 and n. 120.

¹⁷ Plutarch was most interested in this Roman electioneering practice of baring one’s wounds: cf. Roman Questions 276c–d with Leigh 1995.

¹⁸ Thus Oliver 1959, 57.

¹⁹ The transfer of the grain material to I.i indeed gives it more prominence, and may well be connected with the contemporary background: grain shortages were dispiritingly familiar to Shakespeare’s audience, and the issue would generate immediacy and engagement. Cf. pp. 254 and 263 n. 12 and e.g. Patterson 1989, 132–3; George 2000, esp. 69–70.

²⁰ Notice that, though following Plutarch so closely in Volumnia’s great speech, he suppresses the part that deals precisely with the niceties of reciprocity (36.2–3 = NDS 540, ‘Dost thou think it honourable for a noble man to remember the wrongs and injuries done him, and dost not in like case think it an honest noble man’s part to be thankful for the goodness that parents do shew to their children, acknowledging the duty and reverence they ought to bear unto them?’ etc.). Instead of emphasizing this desire for repaying in kind, Shakespeare stresses how he will do this: as Bradley 1911–12, 466–8, brought out, it is through the burning of Rome. That is an unplutarchan theme.

²¹ Nuttall 1983, 119, objects to the word ‘modesty’. For him, the reluctance should not be seen as any such ‘co-operative’ societal virtue: this, he claims, is too much of a shame culture for that, and this Coriolanus too competitive and glory-based. That argument is too simple in itself. This Roman society, like all others, resists description in so simple a term, and Coriolanus’ motives have included ‘for his country’: that is co-operative. But Coriolanus can still reasonably dislike the elision of this ‘co-operative’ motive implicit in treating the wounds as a career-move, and that returns us to ‘pride’.

²² Russell 1963, 22 = Scardigli 1995, 359–60.

²³ Cf. pp. 155–6 and 309–10.

²⁴ Cf. Pelling 1988, esp. 13–14 and notes on 31.2, 35.2–3, and 54.1–5.

²⁵ Just as Homer’s Andromache knows the only way to persuade her Hector is to find a soldierly argument: the walls are so weak here, they need a defence (Il. 6.433–9). A little earlier Volumnia’s pleading ‘I am in this Your wife, your son...’ (III.ii.64–5) suggests Andromache’s immediately preceding ‘you are my father and my lady mother, you my brother, you my strong young husband...’ (Il. 6.429–30); and later the role given the son’s childishness in V.iii, esp. 70–5 and 127–8, surely recalls Astyanax in the same Homeric scene (cf. Brower 1971, 368, 379). Chapman’s translation of Book 6 appeared precisely in 1608, the date often suggested for the play’s composition. Similarly Plutarch’s important ‘orphanage bringeth many discommodities to a child...’ (1.2 = NDS 506, quoted at p. 400) recalls Andromache’s despairing lament for her son’s future at Il. 22.477–514, especially ‘the day of orphanhood makes a child wholly wretched.’ (490). In both texts the allusions presumably emphasize the world of distance between Andromache’s family and Volumnia’s.

²⁶ As Bradley 1911–12, 468–9 observed.

²⁷ The phrase of Ellis-Fermor 1961, 66, observing that much of Volumnia’s pleasure in her son’s wounds is ‘in their market-value’.

²⁸ Though this too grows from something, if not in Plutarch, at least in North: Heuer 1957, 52–3.

²⁹ But there is an expressive silence in Plutarch too: 36.1–2 = NDS 540, ‘he held his peace a pretty while, and answered not a word’.

³⁰ More on this at, particularly, pp. 182, 258, 295–6, 343–4, and Pelling 1988, 13–15 and 1997e.

³¹ Cf. e.g. 7.23.1 and 4, 7.34.3–4, 8.2.2 and 5, 8.54.3, all concerning Coriolanus himself. There is also a wider sense in which all Dionysius’ Book Seven, concerned as it is to explore the clashing perceptions of justice in the Struggle of the Orders, prepares the emphasis here.

³² As Russell 1963, 21, 27–8 = Scardigli 1995, 358–9, 370–1 brings out. This emphasis was not wholly absent from Dionysius, and even occurs briefly in his final summary: ‘he lacked the ability to conciliate and to react with moderation, whenever he was angry with anyone’ (8.61.1). Earlier, cf. esp. 7.21.3, 7.34.5, 7.45.3, 8.22.1, 8.50.1 and 3. But it is much less prominent a theme in Dionysius than in either Plutarch or Shakespeare.

³³ Pace (among others) the New Penguin editor G.R. Hibbard, ‘Nowhere else in the play does Coriolanus appear to better advantage than in this scene of leave-taking which is developed out of a few lines in North.’ (233). That is to reduce Shakespeare’s scene to Dionysius’ equivalent rather than Plutarch’s. Pujante 1990 similarly finds the key to IV.i in North, but emphasizes ‘.he had no sense nor feeling of the hard state he was in’ [words which in fact are pure North, and have no equivalent in Plutarch], and gives us a Coriolanus in shock from his banishment. This too is a possible way of playing the scene.

³⁴ On Plutarch’s interest in such ‘great natures’ cf. Duff 1999, index s.v.

³⁵ Not the happiest of translations. The Greek says ‘made him not easy but awkward for people to accommodate themselves to in company’, and presumably prepares for his difficulties in combining with the commons. Plutarch develops the point a few lines later by talking of his ‘encounters in politics’, which North renders with his ‘they could not be acquainted with him, as one citizen useth to be with another in the city’. Critics (Bradley 1911–12, 464, Granville-Barker 1946, 103, and recently among others Thomas 1989, 155) reasonably observe that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is easier with his peers than North’s ‘churlish, uncivil, and unfit for any man’s conversation’ suggests, and count this as a transformation: but it is a transformation which unconsciously recreates the Plutarchan presentation which North had obscured.

³⁶ See also pp. 340–6. It is scarcely possible to be more wrong than Farnham 1950, 211: ‘As Plutarch sees it, there was nothing paradoxical about the nobility of spirit shown by Coriolanus. His good qualities were thoroughly good and his bad thoroughly bad, and the two sets of qualities were quite separate.’

³⁷ The word at 15.4 is φίλόνίκος, picked up in 15.5 by this ambition ‘to overcome always, and to have the upper hand in all matters’: for the suggestions of philonikia, probably combining both ‘love of victory’ and ‘love of quarrels’, see p. 347 n. 24.

³⁸ ‘Not an aberration but the epitome of the value system’, Thomas 1989, 176, cf. 219: also e.g. Cantor 1976, 15; Miola 1983, 165; Martindale and Martindale 1990, 148–9. Hatlen 1997, 298, now links this question with the problem of Coriolanus’ sense of selfhood: ‘In Coriolanus the issue of identity is posed first of all as a debate over the question of what it means to be a Roman.’

³⁹ It is understandable that Coriolanus has proved unusually receptive to psychoanalytic criticism, esp. Adelman 1980; cf. now Hatlen 1997, 404–11 and other works cited there. Not merely the characterization but also the imagery encourages such an approach: images of (especially distorted) nurturing are frequent, and Coriolanus’ ubiquitous language of orality in various forms – stinking breath, multitudinous tongues, teeth to be cleaned, voices to be given – is likely to be connected. This man of tirades is obsessed with mouths, a very oral figure.

⁴⁰ Or at least in Plutarch’s Volumnia: Honigmann 1976, 173–4, suggests that she may be modelled on the formidable Spartan mothers Plutarch described in his Agesilaus and Pyrrhus.

⁴¹ Thus North, rightly: they did not want Coriolanus to owe his recall to the commons. The Greek reads literally ‘.. .they did not wish the man to return for the commons’ sake’ [or ‘thanks to the commons’, χάριτι του δήμου]. Russell 1963, 26–7 = Scardigli 1995, 369, interprets this as ‘they thought it in the better interests of the demos that Martius should not come back’ and concludes that Plutarch wished to give the patricians the better of the motivational doubt. That takes ‘for the commons’ sake’ closely with ‘wishing’ rather than with ‘return’. If that were right, the implication would be important, for we would have patricians responding to factionalism with moderation rather than Coriolanus-like ferocity; but that interpretation of the Greek seems forced, and so generous a picture of the senators grates with the rest of the passage.

⁴² Plutarch’s name for him is unclear. Dionysius calls him Attius; Plutarch’s manuscripts are split between ‘Autidius’ and ‘Amphidius’. For clarity’s sake I have here kept North’s and Shakespeare’s ‘Aufidius’ throughout, even for Dionysius.

⁴³ Thus for instance, Adelman 1980, 135–6; Paris 1991, 175.

⁴⁴ Cf. Waith 1962, 130–2; Velz 1983, 66–7; and esp. Adelman 1980, 138–40.

⁴⁵ So, sensibly, Poole 1988, 87–9.

⁴⁶ Dionysius has nothing of the tyranny theme, though he does make something of the accusation of treachery (8.57.3, 58.2, 58.4). The ‘envy’ at Rome is a great elaboration on Dionysius: cf. Russell 1963, 23, 25 = Scardigli 1995, 362, 366–7. Dionysius does however have some Volscian envy of Coriolanus (8.57.2–3), but he treats it much less skilfully.

⁴⁷ Cf. pp. 326–7, where I make similar points about Plutarch’s treatment of the climactic scene with Volumnia: yet again, Plutarch’s distinctive touches are very like Shakespeare’s.

⁴⁸ Above, p. 375; cf. also pp. 180–2, where I adopt a version of this approach in discussing Theseus–Romulus.

⁴⁹ Mossman 1994, 73 and 1997.