But a play about a group of highly placed Roman patricians (Brutus, Cassius, and company) plotting to assassinate Julius Caesar had the capacity to raise some awkward questions by means of the implicit parallel.

Plutarch’s greatest importance for Shakespeare was his way of writing history through biography. He taught the playwright that the little human touch often says more than the large impersonal historical force. Plutarch explained his method in the Life of Alexander: “My intent is not to write histories, but only lives. For the noblest deeds do not always show men’s virtues and vices; but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than the famous battles won wherein are slain ten thousand men, or the great armies, or cities won by siege or assault.” So too in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. It is the particular occasion—the single word, the moment of tenderness or jest—that humanizes the superpower politicians: Brutus and Cassius making up after their quarrel, the defeated Cleopatra remembering it is her birthday, Caius Martius exhausted from battle forgetting the name of the man who helped him in Corioles.

In his “Life of Caius Martius” Plutarch gives a brief character-sketch of the Roman general who, by virtue of his heroic endeavor behind the closed gates of Corioles, gained the surname Coriolanus: “For this Martius’ natural wit and great heart did marvelously 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.” As the name Martius suggests, Coriolanus has all the martial virtues. His tragedy is that he has none of the civil ones. He devotes himself wholly to the code of valor (Latin virtus). Where Mark Antony is led astray from Roman values by his lover Cleopatra, Coriolanus is trained up in virtus by his mother, Volumnia. He has a suitably austere Roman wife, who usually appears in company with a chaste companion (Valeria, the very opposite of Cleopatra’s companion Charmian). And when his son, Young Martius, a chip off the old block, is praised for tearing the wings off a butterfly with his teeth, we gain a glimpse into the kind of upbringing that Coriolanus may be imagined to have had. “Anger’s my meat,” says Volumnia: perhaps in compensation for the premature disappearance of her husband, she has bred up an angry young man, ready to serve Rome on the battlefield where one senses she wishes she could go herself—as she does at the end of the play.

If Antony and Cleopatra is about the tragic consequences of the dissolution of Romanness, Coriolanus is about the equally tragic result of an unyielding adherence to it. “It is held,” says Cominius,

That valour is the chiefest virtue, and

Most dignifies the haver: if it be,

The man I speak of cannot in the world

Be singly counterpoised.…

“If it be”: Coriolanus’ own mode of speaking, by contrast, is what he calls the “absolute shall.” To leave room for an “if” would be to call his whole world-picture into question.

The play brings the absolute embodiment of virtus into hostile dialogue with other voices. As in Julius Caesar, the action begins not with the hero but with the people, to whom Plutarch (a believer in the theory that history is shaped by the deeds of great men alone) never gives a voice. In the very early period of the Roman republic, around the fifth century before Christ, Rome faced two threats: an external danger from neighboring territories (the Volscians, based in Antium and Corioles) and the internal danger of division between the patricians and the plebeians. The martial hero is supremely successful in dealing with the external threat through force, but his attempt to handle internal affairs in the same way leads to his banishment and eventual death. The opening scene reveals that the people do have a case: the First Citizen argues cogently against inequality, speaking “in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.” Diplomacy is the skill needed here; Coriolanus, who is always “himself alone” and who trusts in the deeds of the sword rather than the blandishments of the word, will have no truck with compromise. His pride and his desire to stand alone are only allayed when he faces his mother, wife, and son pleading for him to have mercy on the city. Volumnia appeals to the bond of family; after her eloquent entreaty, Coriolanus hovers for a moment in one of the most powerful silences in Shakespeare. He sets aside his code of manly strength, accepts the familial tie, and in so doing effectively signs his own death warrant. He has for the first time fully recognized the claims of other people, escaped the bond of absolute self. The knowledge of what he has done brings a kind of peace: “But let it come,” he says of his inevitable end. He is speaking here in the voice of Stoic resignation.

FROM MOB TO MOTHER: THE CRITICS DEBATE

Shakespeare is traditionally praised for his disinterestedness, his ability to see both sides of a question, to enter into every character and give equal weight to every viewpoint, equal sympathy to every human dilemma. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, delivering a public lecture in the politically polarized wake of the French republican revolution and the subsequent restoration of monarchical values, said that Coriolanus “illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakspere’s politics.” Coleridge knew that it would have been difficult for Shakespeare—with the king in his audience—to write with “philosophic impartiality” about the politics of his own time, so he turned instead to classical Rome: “The instruction of ancient history would seem more dispassionate.” But then Coleridge told his audience that the play begins with “Shakspere’s good-natured laugh at mobs.”1 For Coleridge, a sometime radical whose politics had lurched to the right by the time he delivered his lectures on Shakespeare, and for his predominantly genteel, middle-class audience, during an era of political uncertainty and unrest (the Regency period), “mobs” in the streets of London or Paris were something to be feared. It was comforting to imagine Shakespeare laughing at them, but remaining “good-natured” as he did so. But Coleridge’s emphasis on the comedy—the joke about the “big toe” and so forth—meant that he didn’t take the argument of the people entirely seriously. By not doing so, he was implying that Shakespeare did not, after all, give equal weight to the patrician and the plebeian sides of the question.

Hazlitt’s essay on the play, with which this introduction began, must be seen in the context of Coleridge’s move. Hazlitt, a committed radical democrat, did not regard the play’s opening debate as a laughing matter. He recognized that food riots—whether in ancient Rome, in Shakespeare’s time or his own—were a serious political matter, a matter of life and death. But he also recognized that the stage presence and verbal charisma of Coriolanus upset the political equilibrium:

There is nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that they are like to be so: but when a single man comes forward to brave their cries and to make them submit to the last indignities, from mere pride and self-will, our admiration of his prowess is immediately converted into contempt for their pusillanimity.