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"Anger's My Meat":
Coriolanus and the Emotions of Revenge
by Charles A. Hallett
Frankly, I am puzzled as to why the theme of revenge in
Coriolanus has received so little attention. While I
shall be making as strong a distinction as I can between
this play and Hamlet, Shakespeare's one play written
in the revenge-tragedy form, yet of all Shakespeare's other
plays (with the possible exception of Titus
Andronicus ), there is not one in which the passion of
revenge plays a greater role in the catastrophe than it does
in Coriolanus. Yet, while the subject of revenge has
frequently been explored in plays as diverse as Macbeth,
III Henry VI, Winter's Tale and even Twelfth
Night, few have seen fit to examine the dynamics of
revenge in Coriolanus, where the entire two final
acts are devoted solely to this passion.
It has been stated (I believe accurately) that each of
Shakespeare's plays is sui generis. Where many other
playwrights hit a mother lode and mine it until it is dry,
each of Shakespeare's plays is unique. Yet, as widely varied
as his characters, plots and themes are, Shakespeare has set
at the heart of each of the tragedies one of the limited
number of human passions, and that passion--like the
mainspring of a watch-- drives the action of the play.
But if the number of passions is limited, the causes out of
which each passion can arise and the course that each
passion can take are as various and numerous as the human
beings who feel them. That Shakespeare well knew this is
evidenced by the array of different circumstances he depicts
as motivating his characters to seek revenge, as well as by
the varied means they choose to pursue it. For a multitude
of reasons, only a few of which I will list in this paper,
Hamlet and Coriolanus, which of all of
Shakespeare's plays are the ones in which revenge is most
prominent (again excepting Titus, which I prefer to
regard as having been written by the Seventeenth Earl of
Oxford), are also, in every other respect, about as
different a couple of tragedies as Shakespeare ever
penned.
Revenge can take many forms and to better understand why one
case, Hamlet's, for example, is so distinctive from another,
say Coriolanus's, it is necessary to analyze the forces
working on the different individuals, first to cause them to
desire revenge and, second, to determine what they will
accept as satisfying their craving for that "wild kind of
justice."
That Hamlet is set in Elsinore and Coriolanus
in Rome may at first glance appear no more significant
than the fact that Taming of the Shrew is set in
Padua while Two Gentlemen (another play in which I
prefer to detect the hand of the Seventeen Earl) is set in
Verona. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is
hardly an exaggeration to say that the reason the plays are
so different is not merely that they are set in different
times and places but that they are set in different
universes, one Christian and the other pagan. In the one,
Shakespeare never for a moment allows us to forget the
existence of worlds beyond the visible. Events at Elsinore
are constantly being referred to and weighed by standards
established for man's conduct in realms other than the
material, the existence of those higher realms being
palpable and unquestionable.
If Hamlet seems to wear its Christianity lightly,
this is not because it is not a defining element; it is only
that the Christian assumptions of the play were both the
warp and the woof in the fabric of daily life in Elizabethan
England. Shakespeare could and did take them for granted.
Pagan Rome, on the other hand, though familiar to scholars
to varying degrees, was a world apart to the London
theater-going public. If the audience was to know what
Shakespeare meant them to see as at stake in the minds of
virtuous pagan Romans, he would have to introduce them to
his pagan world early in the play. Thus, in
Coriolanus, we are quickly made aware of the fact
that life in pagan Rome is itself the theme. And the salient
feature of Shakespeare's Rome is its power to encompass and
stamp with its character all aspects of life. Rome is the
foundation and ordering principle in the lives of all those
who would call themselves Roman. In the eyes of its
inhabitants, the Rome of Coriolanus has swollen so
large in significance as to obscure man's view of anything
beyond the mundane. With the universe contracted to the
physical dimensions of Rome and with no other order of being
impinging on the material order, Rome paradoxically takes on
mythic proportions.
The crucial point is not how accurately Shakespeare depicts
life as it was lived in pre-Christian Rome but how aware the
viewer must be of the distinction Shakespeare makes between
his pagan Rome and, say, his Christian Elsinore. Christians,
much like anyone else, develop loyalties to the communities
in which they reside. However, the focus of their lives, the
orientation of their spiritual being, is not to be found in
the ground they tread on or the edifices they live in. Their
summum bonum transcends material existence. Every moment of
Hamlet is steeped in this assumption. No matter how
deep one's despair, suicide is not an option, because the
Everlasting has fixed his canon against it. And if one's
desire to remain faithful to God's injunctions is not a
strong enough deterrent, then fear of the unknown in the
afterlife usually is. Ophelia, who dies under questionable
circumstances, is denied Christian burial because she may
have damned her soul. To save his soul, Claudius would
repent, but even to save his soul he will not give up those
things he killed to get. Hamlet, ever conscious of souls and
their states, stumbles onto the King while the King is at
prayer. Hamlet would kill him, but he doesn't, lest he
become the agent that sends Claudius' soul heavenward.
These and many other elements in Hamlet define the
play's world as Christian. Yet even with all these Christian
trappings, Shakespeare is not necessarily saying that the
Dane's belief in the hereafter is true. He might, in fact,
have wanted to depict Elsinore at the time of Hamlet as a
peculiarly superstitious place. The Ghost makes his meaning
abundantly clear: one may argue endlessly about exactly
where the Ghost comes from; however, what is not at question
is that the Ghost is real and that he comes from somewhere
else. The universe of Hamlet is multileveled. And it is this
figure from beyond this world that motivates the revenge
action of the play.
Not so in Coriolanus. By contrast, the universe of
Coriolanus is limited to the mud, bricks, and mortar
of Rome. Rome is the defining entity in the lives of all its
citizens. Their spiritual atmosphere is the air of Rome,
their mental horizons end at the walls of Rome, and their
lives end under the soil of Rome. They are born in Rome,
they are then shaped by Rome, so that they may serve Rome.
They are even to die for Rome, and Rome will then remember
them. Rome is their cradle, their world, their grave, and
their monument.
Rome's presence is so palpable in the play that it is felt
to be a walking, breathing entity on the stage, which in a
way it is, in the character of Volumnia. Much as the Ghost
signifies that the world of Hamlet reaches out beyond
the temporal, Volumnia, with her easy insistence on the
primacy of everything Roman, delimits the dimensions of the
world of Coriolanus as coincident with the walls of
Rome.
If the universes of the plays are spectacularly opposed to
one another, the characters of the heroes are no less so.
How could it be otherwise? While Hamlet is everything
the Renaissance prince ought to be, the soldier, scholar,
and courtier, he is first and foremost a man strongly given
to introspection, a thinker rather than a doer--a fact
highlighted by his more than two hundred lines of soliloquy
rich in metaphysical speculation. Coriolanus, though no
fool, is primarily a warrior, a man of action little given
to inward rumination. He has hardly a reflective moment.
When he does speculate, it is on the health and nature of
Rome. In fact, he is the quintessential Roman. His virtues
are those that Rome instills into her best sons. His fierce,
unquestioning and uncompromising loyalty unto death to those
principles he recognizes as constituting Romanness are his
strength and will become his destruction. When Rome proves
to be less consistent in her views and more flexible in her
virtues than she has taught him to be, the groundwork is
laid for revelations with the most serious consequences. If
Rome itself proves no more stable than her mutable plebeians
do, how can she demand of her faithful servants a singleness
of purpose that she herself lacks? When Coriolanus hears the
flower of Roman society advocate the use of hypocrisy
because of its expediency, he feels like a deceived lover
who has just learned the truth. His idol has betrayed him.
Revenge is the only answer to such betrayal.
Let us see how Shakespeare develops this reversal theme in
Coriolanus, moving his protagonist from idealistic
Roman to disillusioned revenger.
Shakespeare devotes Act I to developing Coriolanus as a
paragon among Romans. We learn so much of the training he
received and his responses to his lessons that it is almost
as if we are witnessing his growth under the watchful eyes
of the patricians, all of whom seem to be his mentors. The
impression of his youthfulness is enhanced by the fact that
everyone around him (except his wife) is so much older.
First there is that embodiment of Rome, his mother. Then
there is Menenius, whom he regards as a father. Next there
are the generals under whom he serves, Lartius and Cominius.
He has learned from these to be what Rome needs, a stalwart
warrior. Cominius calls him "flower of warriors" (1.6.33).
And Lartius, thinking him killed in battle, eulogizes him
with "Thou wast a soldier / Even to Cato's wish" (1.4.58-9).
His tutelage is completed at Corioles where his valor earns
him the name of Coriolanus.
What, then, are the virtues of the true Roman? To love Rome
above all else and be valiant in her defense. Valor is the
preeminent virtue.
... The deeds of
Coriolanus
Should not be uttered feebly. It is held
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. (2.2.80-85)
What makes a Roman is not
the mere fact of his having been born within the walls of
Rome. Coriolanus makes this quite explicit:
I would they were
barbarians, as they are,
Though in Rome lettered; not Romans, as they are not,
Though calved i' th' porch o' th' Capitol.
(3.1.237-9)
Romanness, in this play, is something to be achieved. It
requires that you understand what she expects of her sons
and that you put her before all else, including yourself. As
Coriolanus expresses it:
If any think brave
death outweighs bad life
And that his country's dearer than himself;
Let him alone, or so many so minded,
Wave thus to express his disposition,
And follow Martius. (1.6.71-75)
Rome, then, in this play, is the summum bonum. Whereas in
Elsinor, actions are constantly being referred to and
weighed by standards established for man's conduct in realms
other than the material order, in Rome, Rome itself is
all-embracing. There is nothing beyond, no immortal,
invisible presence to Whom one can turn for refuge against
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
In act II we have the attempt of a grateful Rome to reward
her reluctant hero.
... You shall not
be
The grave of your deserving. Rome must know
The value of her own. 'Twere a concealment
Worse than a theft, no less than a traducement,
To hide your doings and to silence that
Which, to the spire and top of praises vouched,
Would seem but modest. (1.9.20-25)
However, all Rome is not unanimous in Coriolanus's praise.
Since he has opposed giving the plebeians their tribunes,
the tribunes fear what will happen to them when he becomes
consul. So, in act II, the conflict shifts from Rome's war
with external enemies to the discord the tribunes sow within
Rome itself by manipulating the opinion of the mutable
masses.
Under the watchful eye of his mother and Menenius,
Coriolanus reluctantly performs the humiliating ceremony of
begging from the plebeians what he has already earned
defending Rome on the battlefield. And he is named consul.
But the tribunes are not so easily defeated as the
Volsces.
There were two classes in Rome. For Coriolanus, the
difference between them wasn't wealth vs. poverty. The
distinction was between those who had virtue and those who
didn't. The virtuous could be counted on; they were
committed to personal reliability. They adhered to an ethic
that placed their personal well being beneath fidelity to an
unalterable code of conduct. Consequently, they were
reliable, both in peace and war.
You that will be
less fearful than discreet,
That love the fundamental part of state
More than you doubt the change on't, that prefer
A noble life before a long, and wish
To jump a body with a dangerous physic
That's sure of death without it . . . (3.1.151-56)
These are the people to whom Horace was speaking when he
said "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." The
other class was the mutable, rank-scented meiny, the
"slippery people / Whose love is never linked to the
deserver / Till his deserts are past" (Antony &
Cleopatra 1.2.186-88; "this common body, / Like to a
vagabond flag upon the stream, / Goes to and back, lackeying
the varying tide, / To rot itself with motion" (Antony
& Cleopatra 1.4.44-47). The members of this second
class are incapable of true judgment, because they are
guided only by their light, volatile, inconstant
opinions.
In the third act, the conflict shifts once again. Coriolanus
is now pitted against the other patricians. The entire
thrust of the first two acts has been to establish clearly
the enormous gap that exists between the contrasted stoical
constancy of the patricians and the untrustworthiness of the
fickle plebeians. Imagine Coriolanus's surprise in Act III
when his mother and Menenius exhort him to fight fire with
fire. If the tribunes are crafty and scheming, if they will
use any means to win including lying and rabble-rousing
demagoguery, then one must beat them at their own game.
Volumnia tries to ease her son's over-scrupulous conscience
by assuring him that hypocrisy in a good cause is no
sin:
... Now it lies you
on to speak
To th' people, not by your own instruction,
Not by th' matter which your heart prompts you,
But with such words that are but roted in
Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables
Of no allowance to your bosom's truth.
(3.2.52--57)
But those were not the lessons we saw taught and learned in
act I. The lesson Coriolanus absorbed then was that the
heart of Roman virtue was steadfastness and reliability in
the face of shifting circumstances. The cynical realism that
his mother suggests he embrace in act III has the
unmistakable ring of the Machiavellianism that Coriolanus
associates with the tribunes and therefore has no place in
his ideal concept of Roman honor:
... Nay,
mother,
Where is your ancient courage? 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. (4.1.3-11)
A rift develops between Coriolanus and his mentors.
Coriolanus is often said to be proud, unyielding, and
politically rash. His unremitting loyalty to his values
hardly wins him the respect that we give to Hamlet for his.
Yet more than once Shakespeare depicts Coriolanus keeping
faith with the virtue of honor that makes him a citizen of
Rome, remaining true to the highest value that Shakespeare's
pagan Rome affords its hero, his heart "invincibly"
loyal.
Coriolanus's is the invincible heart that learned the
precepts with a depth of sincerity and commitment absent
from those who instructed him. Shakespeare has drawn him of
heroic dimensions, with a need to devote his enormous energy
to something larger than himself. His virtues, valor, honor,
constancy, all presuppose that they will find their
expression in the service of a state worthy of Coriolanus's
loyalty. He believes Rome to be such an entity. But
suddenly, in act III, Coriolanus finds himself unexpectedly
opposed by the other patricians. Unaccountably, they are
willing to grant the plebeians the tribunes with whom they
will have to divide their power. Coriolanus insists that
Rome cannot survive a divided rule:
... This double
worship,
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other
Insult without all reason; where gentry, title,
wisdom,
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no
Of general ignorance--it must omit
Real necessities, and give way the while
To unstable slightness. (3.1.142-48)
No one denies the accuracy
of his appraisal; it is just that he seems not to be dancing
to the same music they are hearing. Pragmatism is the order
of the day: Salvage what you can lest you lose all. Speaking
for the patricians, Volumnia, the image of Rome, puts it
bluntly:
You are too
absolute. (3.2.39)
* * * *
These are the climactic moments out of which the catastrophe
will develop. And Shakespeare will work this development
through those dramatic techniques he has perfected over his
entire career. Primary among these is the use of the
reversal. Up to this point, Coriolanus's enemies have been
the patricians' enemies, too--the Volsces and the tribunes.
As the guardian of all he and the patricians regard as
Roman, Coriolanus would fight either of these enemies to the
death. Rather no Rome than a Rome subjected to any power
hostile to its nobility. However, act III calls into
question everything that has gone before. Suddenly the
patricians are not only advocating compromise with the
treacherous tribunes; they will willingly embrace the very
tactics that render the tribunes loathsome. Beyond that, his
mother upbraids Coriolanus for not acknowledging the
expediency of using hypocrisy to deceive the tribunes.
Though this new guidance flies in the face of everything he
had previously been taught by these same people, Coriolanus
tries to conform to their pleas that he allow his tongue to
say things abhorrent to his heart. But the tribunes, better
schooled in the devious uses of rhetoric, are too crafty for
Coriolanus. They know that he, like Macbeth, is most
sensitive concerning what he is proudest of. They call him
traitor.
Ironically, Coriolanus is most vulnerable now because in his
compliance with his mother's wishes, he almost feels that he
in fact is a traitor. He throws off the cloak of hypocrisy,
calls them a "common cry of curs" and answers their sentence
of banishment by proclaiming that "I banish you."
Shortly thereafter, he denies his name, while announcing his
intention to raze Rome to the ground (5.1.11-15). Baffled by
what he perceives as Rome's abandonment of her fixed place
in the firmament and her betrayal of those who placed their
faith in her, Coriolanus goes into exile promising to turn
the full fury of his revenge on Rome.
What is it that Coriolanus is revenging? Though the passion
may be the same as Hamlet's, the motives are as dissimilar
as the worlds the two men inhabit. Suddenly the
self-sacrificing hero becomes consumed with thoughts of
himself. He has been betrayed, not by the tribunes (they are
beneath contempt); he has been betrayed by Rome. He can
banish Rome when he goes into exile because the Rome he was
faithful to he can no longer associate with the physical
Rome.
The ideal Rome his mother had created for him and identified
with the walled city he walked, talked, and ate in was
supposed to be in opposition to the city the mutable
groundlings took for Rome. But his mother had misled him:
there was no such place--only in his idealizing imagination.
Consequently he offers to join Aufidius against "our dastard
nobles, who / Have all forsook me . . . So use it / That my
revengeful services may prove / As benefits to thee. For I
will fight / Against my cankered country with the spleen /
Of all the under fiends" (4.5.78-79, 91-95).
When the Rome that Boethius served turned against him,
Boethius found consolation in the fact that this was no more
or less than what one should know to expect from the world.
It was a conformation that one should be willing to abandon
this world for the sake of the next. Such consolation is
unavailable to Coriolanus, because the play depicts a world
entirely cut off from the transcendent. The distinguishing
trait of the world Shakespeare has created in
Coriolanus is that man's moral life is bound up
solely with his loyalty to Rome. Virtue here was an
unquestioning willingness to subordinate one's impulses and
desires to the needs of Rome. Virtue, then, had nothing to
do with achieving salvation for one's soul but only with the
performance of one's duty.
In the opening act of the play, Coriolanus wholeheartedly
embraces the role of valiant warrior because he assumes Rome
to be worthy of his allegiance. With Rome having proven
false to the very ideals she taught, Coriolanus has nothing
to fall back on. He has been stripped of every belief that
engendered in him the willing renunciation and sacrifice
that made him the epitome of Romanness. The self that had
found fulfillment in abnegation now turns inward and focuses
its energies on feeding its own hurt. Its food is images of
revenge. But not a revenge, as in Hamlet, which the
hero only reluctantly takes up because it lays across his
path ("O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it
right!"). Coriolanus's revenge has more the ring of "How
dare they do this to me," with a very strong emphasis on the
"me." The paradox that sustains the moral life of most
communities and characterized the opening of Coriolanus
-- that the self is healthiest when it is not the
subject of its energies -- finds a horrible vindication in
the spectacle of the self seeking self-justification.
Nothing looms so large in the view of the vengeful
Coriolanus as his injured self. Nothing is too precious to
be sacrificed to its hunger.
This sounds much more like Medea than Hamlet, and for good
reason. Coriolanus's motive for revenge is almost exactly
hers. Both gave their unconditional love and devotion to a
being they assumed worthy of their deepest reverence. They
each had within themselves the resources and needs to
prostrate themselves in worshipful adoration before
something higher than themselves. The power to conceive of
an ideal raised both Coriolanus and Medea to their highest
fulfillment. When they found their gods to be idols made of
clay, their sense of betrayal knew no limits, their sense of
degradation no depths. Each was a person with huge
capacities for both good and evil. While they were
believers, their self-sacrifice was of the dimensions
martyrs are made from. But, discovering the depths of their
betrayal, both become aware that all their sacrifices have
been mocked. Once thus disillusioned, the offended self
becomes enflamed with the sense of injustice and the need
for swift revenge.
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