Shakespeare Report: The Tragedy of Coriolanus

Fragile masculinity finds compassion and is punished for it

Coriolanus is the penultimate play in my Shakespeare Project. I have sworn to finish the project this month. Before the year is out, at least! For it was in this year, four hundred years ago, that the First Folio was compiled and published in London, a full seven years after the death of Shakespeare. I didn’t realize the significance of the timing when I embarked on the project, and indeed, originally planned to complete the entire project and my modest responses in the summer of 2022.

Shakespeare (and whichever company friend was lounging around the table) penned Coriolanus around 1608 - but if the First Folio was published 15 years later, then the true provenance of so many of these pieces are lost in time. Scholars try to date works based on mentions of the weather, the seasonal ice on the Thames, the mulberry tax and urban riots and so forth, but the truth can never be known, barring a Tudor Time Machine, in which case, sign me up.

The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest are all thought to have come out after Coriolanus, and those three plays certainly share common themes of pride, pathos, aging, and a desire to turn back the clock and make things magically right again (A Winter’s Tale) or to simply punch out (the Tempest).

I was fortunate to come across a full-length feature video of a 2014 production of Coriolanus in London starring Tom Hiddleston, who can do justice and more to any Shakespeare lead role. I had to dig around awhile for this one and am not entirely convinced that I watched it in a completely legal way, but 38 plays into the Project I am by now very familiar with the importance of an excellent production to follow with the text at hand. Theater was meant to be acted, seen, taken in, with a thousand tiny contexts that give greater meaning to every character, action, and plot. A good production increases the meaning a thousandfold. A middling production, or no production, renders flat the meaning and makes every act a slog to watch. (I have left after minutes many poor online productions, and made middling ones work for the purpose of the Project, so much so that I do not exaggerate when I affirm the utter joy in seeing a piece well produced.)

Again, Shakespeare: a writer for the ages. Although the plot and characters from Coriolanus were improvised from the pages of Plutarch’s Lives (45-120 CE), the poetry and swiftness are all Shakespeare, and the content insistently modern. A spoiler: Coriolanus, Caius Martius, is a soldier, raised on his mother Volumnia’s ideals of strength and valor, yet his masculine persona fails him when he needs it most, raising a wall between him and the Roman people at a critical point in his leadership, leading them to mistrust him and what they perceive as his pageantry and snobbery.

The scheming patricians observe that the common folk are far more easily convinced with their eyes than their ears. (One magnificent Elliot Levey steals more than one scene as the imperturbable Brutus. I am going to go look up his actor.)

Coriolanus also gives us the famous “belly speech” of Menenius (a boon for all History of Science scholars!), in which the patrician ally of Coriolanus explains statecraft to the common folk on a level that he believes they might better understand:

Note me this, good friend; Your most grave belly was deliberate, Not rash like his accusers, and thus answered: “True is it, my incorporate friends,” quoth he, “That I receive the general food at first Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the storehouse and the shop Of the whole body. But, if you do remember, I send it through the rivers of your blood Even to the court, the heart, to th’ seat o’ th’ brain; And, through the cranks and offices of man, The strongest nerves and small inferior veins From me receive that natural competency Whereby they live. And though that all at once, You, my good friends”—this says the belly, mark me—

“Though all at once cannot See what I do deliver out to each, Yet I can make my audit up, that all From me do back receive the flour of all, And leave me but the bran.” What say you to ’t?

The senators of Rome are this good belly, And you the mutinous members. For examine Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly Touching the weal o’ th’ common, you shall find No public benefit which you receive But it proceeds or comes from them to you And no way from yourselves. What do you think, You, the great toe of this assembly?

The tragedy in Coriolanus is that both he and his mother Volumnia come to see how their Roman culture and her insistently aggressive upbringing will destroy them all. Yet even Volumnia sees - sooner than her son - how anger is better employed in cunning than in brash argument. She begs Coriolanus to be brave, be cunning.

But Coriolanus insists that he can be no other than he is - a valiant solder. Then the unthinkable happens. He is banished from Rome by the people, who are in turn supported by the scheming patricians, who themselves have little use for army types.

Coriolanus is irate. You banish me? he shrieks. No, no, I banish YOU. (I felt like adding here, “you deplorables.”) There is a world elsewhere! Out the gate he goes, Rome in the rearview mirror.

He seeks asylum at the table of Aufidius, his mortal enemy and the general of the Volscian (VOL-skian) army. Pleading a damaged spirit (or ego?), Coriolanus turns up at midnight, saying he is a changed man (“my birthplace hate I”), that the Volscians are no longer his enemy (he’s really sorry he killed so many of them), but rather all of Rome, including his mother, wife, and son, all of whom bear some blame for his banishment. He will mow them all to the ground, he says, no matter the body from which the blood flows. Aufidius likes this kind of talk very much and in return makes Coriolanus a general of the Volscian army. Incredibly, (and how charismatic is Coriolanus?), he charms the entire army of his enemy so much so that they begin to say the grace at their meals in his name.

Yet when his mother, wife and son come to plead the Roman case, Coriolanus does experience a true change of heart, and decides he won’t destroy Rome after all.

“Don’t you think my weeping mother was convincing?” Coriolanus asks hopefully, seeking validation.

“I was moved withal,” Aufidius nods, hand on his hilt.

Do you think this ends well for Coriolanus?

It does not.

For his soldier’s hard heart had made a pact with an even harder heart in Audifius. There can be no going back. The softening into compassion, the retreat into a new definition of moral dignity is not an outcome that Aufidius is willing to accept. The tragedy, then, at the end of the play (where tragedies most frequently end), is in the execution of Coriolanus by Aufidius for breaking his word. At his transformative moment of compassion for the Romans, a case pleaded by his own family, he gives his own life. Thus does fragile masculinity with in the form of Aufidius, and an evolved, compassionate morality is murdered. Might makes right, in the end, even if might concedes that, well, right may have a point.

You need only consider current events for a few moments to see the similarities in the modern world, and track the unfolding of non-theatrical plots. Soldiers and politicians charge ahead to destroy, banish, and shed blood, their families in turn beg for their own lives, soldiers have change of heart, are killed, literally or figuratively, by the harder-hearted.

Next up, the very last play, to be done posthaste: King Henry VIII. You might wonder what Shakespeare found fit to write and perform about the Tudor king. I certainly am curious. Wasn’t he a bit of a fresh memory still? Elizabeth had just died in 1604. Perhaps people felt like they could finally say what they'd been thinking for the past 80 years. This last play in the Shakespeare Project was written two or three years before William died of a fever after drinking too long in the evening garden with his boon companions.

I’ve been invited to write my retrospective thoughts on the Shakespeare Project for publication before 2023 is out. I hope to make this deadline. Perhaps it might become a book project, à la Julie and Julia.