Coriolanus: A Critical Reader

Liam E. Semler, Lisa Hopkins, Andrew Hiscock, Liam E. Semler

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350111202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Coriolanus is the last and most intriguing of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies. Critics, directors and actors have long been bewitched by this gripping character study of a warrior that Rome can neither tolerate nor do without. Caius Martius Coriolanus is a terrifying war machine in battle, a devoted son to a wise and ambitious mother at home, and an inflammatory scorner of the rights and rites of the common people. This Critical Reader opens up the extraordinary range of interpretation the play has elicited over the centuries and offers exciting new directions for scholarship. The volume commences with a Timeline of key events relating to Coriolanus in print and performance and an Introduction by the volume editor. Chapters survey the scholarly reaction to the play over four centuries, the history of Coriolanus on stage and the current research and thinking about the play. The second half of the volume comprises four 'New Directions' essays exploring: the rhetoric and performance of the self, the play's relevance to our contemporary world, an Hegelian approach to the tragedy, and the insights of computer-assisted stylometry. A final chapter critically surveys resources for teaching the play.

1

The Critical Backstory

Huw Griffiths

Interpreting Coriolanus

Coriolanus, the play, and Coriolanus, the character, are two things that seem to demand interpretation. They want us to work hard at making sense of them. At the same time, however, they both frustrate efforts to bring them clearly into focus. They are, you might say, ‘open to interpretation’.

Take the play’s final scene. Within barely a couple of minutes of stage-time, Coriolanus moves from defiantly inviting his enemies to ‘Cut me to pieces’ to being ignominiously trampled on as he is killed, and then to being lifted off stage as a military hero. Aufidius, his nemesis, makes a confused attempt to summarize his story:

Though in this city he

Hath widowed and unchilded many a one,

Which to this hour bewail the injury,

Yet he shall have a noble memory.

(5.6.152–5)

The conspicuous paradoxes contained in Aufidius’s final speech, as he is preparing to help carry Coriolanus’s body offstage, not only frustrate our capacity immediately to grasp the meaning of the performance, they also anticipate the interpretative work that audiences and critics have undertaken ever since. How is it possible to reconcile the man who ‘hath widowed and unchilded many a one’ with the man of ‘noble memory’? How is a character who clearly revels in violence and who displays an all-consuming contempt for the Roman people, particularly the plebeians against whom he pits the values of his own patrician class, to be squared with the celebration of him as a man of honour and virtue? If people are still ‘bewailing the injury’, how can his death become an occasion for tragic reconciliation? Even as the play seems to come to a conclusion, further interpretation is invited.¹

In this chapter, I examine some aspects of how Coriolanus has been discussed from the period when the first Shakespeare criticism appeared – the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – and will consider how those critical debates have developed through the centuries. I will pay particular attention, throughout, to the way that critics have variously responded to the fragmentary, open-ended or ambiguous nature of the play and its central character. From John Dennis in 1712 (who considered the play to be ‘without moral’ because of its inconsistencies) through to current readings of the play, writers have contended with the difficulties of interpreting one of the most enigmatic of Shakespeare’s plays, and the seeming resistance of both the play and its central protagonist to clear explanation.

But I want, first, to dwell on a particular moment that constitutes a turning point in Shakespeare criticism more broadly, and in Coriolanus criticism in particular. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is a moment in which the critical debate around this play crystallizes, when writers respond to the work of earlier critics but when they also start to formulate the questions that still dominate our understanding of the play. This period in Europe and Britain witnessed a number of revolutions: political, social and cultural. The French Revolution of 1789 that overturned the monarchy, replacing it with a republic, was both the culmination of long-standing political unrest and the starting point of significant political change across the continent. Old orthodoxies were questioned and traditional political forms overturned. In the arts, these political changes were reflected in the Romantic movement. In writers’ approaches to Shakespeare, this included a new approach, away from an emphasis placed by writers of the previous age on the moral implications of his plots, and toward a focus on the psychology of individual characters. Also bolstered by the very early beginnings of the academic study of English literature, and the development of the public lecture as a major cultural form, this period saw a pronounced interest in Shakespeare as a topic of discussion. And, given the topicality of many of the events that are central to the plot of Coriolanus – popular riots against the patrician class; patrician disdain for popular dissent; the politics of domestic upheaval and of international conflict – it is no surprise to find that the play featured prominently in those discussions.

In an introduction to an 1808 edition of the play, Elizabeth Inchbald captures the potential for topical interpretation occasioned by the play at this time. Inchbald was a successful novelist, a very successful playwright and a less successful actor. The edition – from her twenty-five-volume collection The British Theatre – records the text adapted by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and used by a famous production that had John Philip Kemble in the lead role. The Kemble production had been running since 1789 and would last on the stage until 1817. However, Inchbald is writing just after an eight-year hiatus in the run (from 1797 to 1806) which she explains as follows:

This noble drama, in which Mr. Kemble reaches the utmost summit of the actor’s art, has been withdrawn from the theatre of late years, for some reasons of state. When the lower order of people are in good plight, they will bear contempt with cheerfulness, and even with mirth; but poverty puts them out of humour at the slightest disrespect. Certain sentences in this play are therefore of dangerous tendency at certain times, though at other periods they are welcomed with loud applause.²

Inchbald’s account of the play’s ‘dangerous tendency at certain times’ confirms the ‘openness’ of Coriolanus to interpretation. At times of political unrest, the ‘lower order of people’ might see in it some justification for violent complaint; at less fraught periods, they might consider the harsh treatment of the plebeians by the patricians in the play with greater equanimity. How the play is interpreted depends upon context and the kinds of question that you bring to it. This account of a particular production also confirms the undecidability of the play’s politics. If Emma Smith is right that the play often tries, but somehow fails, to ‘get to know’ its central protagonist, then the same might be said of its political significance.³ That it is a play about politics and, particularly, about the relationship of the people to the ruling classes is without question. But how the play thinks about that relationship, or what it wants us to think about this, is unclear. The paradoxes in Coriolanus’s character go hand in hand with the undecidability of the play’s politics.

William Hazlitt, another early-nineteenth-century writer working among the after-effects of the French Revolution, took the paradoxes in Coriolanus’s character to be a virtue of the play. In his influential book from 1817, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, he writes that, ‘Coriolanus himself is a complete character’ and then goes on to derive what he sees as the ‘complete’ nature of Coriolanus from an itemized list of interrelated contradictions in his motivations and actions:

Coriolanus himself is a complete character: his love of reputation, his contempt of popular opinion, his pride and modesty, are consequences of each other. His pride consists in the inflexible sternness of his will; his love of glory is a determined desire to bear down all opposition, and to extort the admiration both of friends and foes. His contempt for popular favour, his unwillingness to hear his own praises, spring from the same source. He cannot contradict the praises that are bestowed upon him; therefore he is impatient at hearing them. He would enforce the good opinion of others by his actions, but does not want their acknowledgements in words.⁴

Hazlitt sees Coriolanus as innately contradictory but also sees in these seeming contradictions the makings of a unique character. So, even though he appears both prideful and modest, this irregularity is derived from what Hazlitt calls Coriolanus’s ‘inflexible sternness’. This is also true for Inchbald, who sees Coriolanus as a ‘spoiled child’ whose ‘vices and virtues … are blended’:

The vices and virtues of Coriolanus are blended, by the poet’s hand, with the nicest observance of filial similitude, as well as of filial piety. He possesses in his military character all the fire, courage, and ambition of his mother – and, as a politician, all the woman’s vanity and petty pride. Yet no one can be offended with this spoiled child for his humours, as he retains a most grateful sense of that maternal tenderness which inspired his thirst of fame; though it possibly had impeded the philosophical strength of mind which would have rendered his valour of importance.⁵

Inchbald might be skewering the character of Coriolanus with this very faint praise, but she celebrates Shakespeare’s capacity to produce a complex, multifaceted character. The way that she sees Coriolanus’s character as something that is dependent on an assessment of the character of his mother, Volumnia, is something that I will look at again in the part of this chapter devoted to a twentieth-century psychoanalytic reading of the play.

Hazlitt’s book, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, comes at a turning point in the history of Shakespeare criticism. Like Inchbald, he moves the critical discussion away from the very precise concerns with plot – and particularly with the moral implications of plot – that so much occupied writers in the eighteenth century. Duncan Wu writes of Hazlitt’s work on Shakespeare as being part of a shift toward a recognizably modern understanding of the plays:

Here was a new approach responsive to the Romantic fascination with psychology. And therein lies the key to Hazlitt’s modernity. He saw that Shakespeare’s gift lay in his understanding of the mind, and interpreted the plays in that light.⁶

In terms of Coriolanus criticism, Hazlitt’s modernity certainly does predict later tendencies to resolve the play’s perceived problems or contradictions within an understanding of the central character’s complex psychology. In this, his work not only foreshadows the ‘character criticism’ of early-twentieth-century critics like A. C. Bradley but also the influential psychoanalytic approaches taken by later-twentieth-century critics like Janet Adelman, both of which will be covered in more detail below.

There are other ways in which Hazlitt’s approach to the play foreshadows later developments. He is also concerned to isolate the play’s problematic politics. Together with the elusive nature of Coriolanus’s character, the precise politics of the play have been a constant concern in Coriolanus criticism. Hazlitt opens his essay on Coriolanus with the idea that the play is a ‘store-house of political common-places’:

The arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power, and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher.⁷

However, he determines that ultimately the play comes down against the ‘many’ and in favour of the ‘privileges of the few’. Hazlitt’s essay pre-dates by two years Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, with its famous invocation to the people that they should continue to rise up against their aristocratic oppressors following the Peterloo Massacre which had seen government troops open fire on workers: ‘Ye are many – they are few!’⁸ But the same juxtaposition of the ‘many’ and the ‘few’ is an indication of the extent to which Hazlitt’s essay on Coriolanus is similarly involved with his contemporary political moment, as much as it is with the play itself. He even claims, albeit a little facetiously, that reading the play could be a useful substitute for reading either Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France or Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, the two key English political texts responding to the political upheaval and opportunities of the French Revolution, from conservative and radical perspectives, respectively. Ultimately, though, Hazlitt claims that Shakespeare comes down on the side of the aristocrats rather than the people. ‘Shakespear’, he writes, ‘himself seems to lean to the arbitrary side of the question’.⁹ But this claim, too, is founded as much on Hazlitt’s engagement with contemporary political arguments as on a treatment of Shakespeare’s play. As Hazlitt claims to see it, one of the reasons for Shakespeare, in Coriolanus, coming down on the side of the conservative traditions of hereditary rule rather than on the side of the people’s democratic rights is because, ‘[t]he principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle’.¹⁰ ‘Poetry’, he writes, ‘is right-royal’ in that its bias in favour of representing extreme positions prevents it from adopting more equitable visions of the world. His sardonic treatment of poetry as necessarily ‘royal’ or ‘arbitrary’ is, for his contemporary readers, a not-so-subtle attack on the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had abandoned the radical cause in the years following the revolution, becoming a target for younger Romantic writers like Hazlitt. The essay also has the John Kemble production of the play in mind and is, in fact, an extended version of a review that had already appeared in the journal The Examiner. That production was, as Jonathan Sachs describes it, an ‘emphatically aristocratic staging of the play’.¹¹ Hazlitt would have seen this production in the last year of its run, when it had returned to the stage after its hiatus. But, as we have seen in Inchbald’s account of the play and the production, the politics of the production were not so straightforwardly ‘on the arbitrary side’ as Hazlitt claims. Her account points toward the ways in which the play might have, rather, in the political contexts of the early nineteenth century, given impetus to political action on behalf of the ‘many’ against the ‘few’. That this judgement of the play is based on the same production that Hazlitt identifies as, for him, leaning distinctly toward what he considers to be the play’s own natural tendency toward supporting the ‘few’ over the ‘many’ is a good indication of the complexities involved in identifying the politics of Coriolanus.

The undecidability of the play’s politics at this moment – what Sachs calls the ‘culture wars that accompanied the reception of the French Revolution in Britain’ – can be partly explained by the immediate concerns of the early nineteenth century.¹² But that Coriolanus, whether in Hazlitt’s somewhat tetchy essay, or in the famous Kemble production, or in Inchbald’s mediation of that production, proved to be a particularly fertile site for political engagement also has something to do with the play itself. If Coriolanus has a particular political ‘moment’ in the years following the French Revolution, this is because questions of its political interpretation might already be built into it.

The contradictions of Coriolanus’s character leave him ‘open to interpretation’; this is also the case with politics of the play. The example of the early-nineteenth-century, post-French ...