The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of necessity.2

Hazlitt the political liberal finds himself at odds with Hazlitt the reader and writer who admires forceful poetic language more than anything else. Coriolanus troubled him with the thought that “the aristocracy of letters”—the best of literature and drama—might at some profound level be incompatible with political ideals of democracy and liberty. All men and women should be equal in the body politic but there is no equality within the body of great writing: Shakespeare stands like a king above his peers.

The influential late nineteenth-century critic Georg Brandes developed Hazlitt’s ideas further. Perhaps literary greatness is inherently on the side of the “aristocratic” principle or at the very least of a form of individualism and inwardness that is at odds with “mass” feeling:

Shakespeare’s aversion to the mob was based upon his contempt for their discrimination, but it had its deepest roots in the purely physical repugnance of his artist nerves to their plebeian atmosphere. To him the Tribunes of the People were but political agitators of the lowest type, mere personifications of the envy of the masses, and representatives of their stupidity and their brute force of numbers. Ignoring every incident which shed favourable light upon the plebeians, he seized upon every instance of popular folly which could be found in Plutarch’s account of a later revolt, in order to incorporate it in his scornful delineation.3

Brandes’s attention to the political implications of Shakespeare’s subtle alterations of his source was further developed in twentieth-century criticism: “In Plutarch’s version, the original revolt is occasioned by the Senate’s support of the city’s usurers, and the issue of the scarcity of grain does not come up until after Coriolanus’s battles with the Volsces. Shakespeare pushes the issue of usury into the background … and brings the issue of grain to the fore.”4 Many critics have suggested that this emphasis was in part a response to the grain riots in the English Midlands—Shakespeare’s home territory—in 1607.

Brandes described Coriolanus as “the tragedy of an inviolably truthful personality in a world of small-minded folk; the tragedy of the punishment a reckless egoism incurs when it is betrayed into setting its own pride above duty to state and fatherland.”5 The question of the play’s attitude to “state and fatherland” became a matter of intense debate in the first half of the twentieth century. Early in 1934, when the French Socialist government was close to collapse, a new translation of Coriolanus was staged at the Comédie Française in Paris. The production was perceived as an attack on democratic institutions. Rioting pro- and anti-government factions clashed in the auditorium. Shakespeare’s translator, a Swiss, was branded a foreign Fascist. The prime minister fired the theater director and replaced him with the head of the security police, whose artistic credentials were somewhat questionable. What are we to conclude from this real life drama? That Coriolanus’ contempt for the rabble makes Shakespeare himself into a proto-Fascist? How could it then have been that the following year the Maly Theatre company in Stalin’s Moscow staged a production of the same play which sought to demonstrate that Coriolanus was an “enemy of the people” and that Shakespeare was therefore a true Socialist? Shakespeare was neither an absolutist nor a democrat, but the fact that both productions were possible is one of the major reasons why he continues to live through his work four centuries after his death.

There is something satisfying in the idea of a Shakespearean performance being condemned one night by fascists castigating it as communist propaganda and the next by communists castigating it as fascist propaganda. Bertolt Brecht, the twentieth-century theater’s greatest political polemicist, was notably attracted to the play for precisely this reason. He saw it as his role to remake the drama in the light of contemporary politics. His adaptation of 1951–52 was shaped by his socialism and reacted against previous critics’ glorification of the military hero: “He saw in it a drama of the people betrayed by their fascist leader.”6 Brecht individualized the citizens, made the tribunes more honorable than Shakespeare’s, and turned the people into a united force. They are joined by some of the patricians in the defense of Rome.

The political problems of Coriolanus arise in part from the distance between Coriolanus’ interaction with the citizens and his personal status as a specifically Roman hero. Roman concepts of honor and valor, as understood by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ground Coriolanus’ character:

Rome is an idea for Coriolanus, the idea of honor, and paradoxically that idea has led him to reject the state which has been its avatar. With increasing painfulness for the audience, Shakespeare explores the implications of this paradox as the play moves toward its bitter end. His honor drives the only honorable man in Rome to treachery, to the betrayal of the state with whom not only his fortunes but also his values are inextricably associated. The process means the destruction of the man.7

The debate over the nature of true “honour” is central to the drama: “Honor is … [Volumnia’s] theme as it is her son’s. But we have seen from the beginning that for Volumnia honor is the glory that Rome can confer on its loyal servants, and that honor can therefore employ policy, political expediency.”8

Coriolanus’ sense of personal honor is that it is a mixture of the inherent and the self-made, whereas some of the other characters and events in the play suggest that heroism is better regarded as a social construct, defined both by action and by society’s recognition. “So our virtues / Lie in th’interpretation of the time,” says Aufidius at the end of Act 4: “that, in one and a half lines,” wrote the critic A. P. Rossiter, “gives the essence of the play. Run over the whole action, act by act, and each is seen as an ‘estimate’ or valuation of Martius.”9

To fulfil his distinction above other men he has to seek dominion over them; but he is bound to fail in this because the distinction is too great; he is too inhuman. Indeed the more godlike he seeks to be, the more inhuman he becomes. The play has very usefully been seen in relation to Aristotle’s celebrated dictum: “He that is incapable of living in a society is a god or a beast” … The ambiguity of Aristotle’s remark is nicely adjusted to the ambiguity … [in the] last tragedies, the moral ambiguity of heroes who are both godlike and inhuman.10

Coriolanus believes himself to be self-sufficient: “As he distrusts words in general and is preoccupied with the private meanings he invests them with, so he distrusts public estimations of himself and is preoccupied with his own inner integrity, his nobility.”11

His self-centeredness means that it is hard for the actor playing him to win the sympathy of the audience. The most powerful tool for a Shakespearean tragic character’s personal engagement with the spectator is strikingly lacking: “Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s least inward tragic hero. He has but one soliloquy”12 (critics actually differ on the number of Coriolanus’ soliloquies, depending on editorial and staging choices, but he certainly speaks fewer than three).