Let me have war, say I.

Coriolanus and the stirring world

This essay was first published online by Liberties in 2024. Liberties can be found at Cordelia Gilligan and Liberties Journal on Substack.

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When the anti-republican Action Française group wanted to incite a revolution against democracy in Paris in 1934, they chose to perform a “freely” translated version of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s 1608 play about a tragic Roman tyrant. Coriolanus has plenty of useful material for the demotically agitating translator. Audience riots ensued. Both the socialists and the fascists were appalled by the play’s apparent favor of conservatism.

Shakespeare, of course, was not so crude. In 1806, Napoleon had banned a production of Coriolanus, thinking it was not anti-democratic but anti-authority, and would reflect badly on him. But one of his supporters in England, the literary critic William Hazlitt thought that, if anything, the play showed more favor to the tyrant than the mob. Later on, the Nazis praised it as a play against weak democracy, while Brecht adapted it as a tragedy of the people.

The explanation for Coriolanus’ enduring provocation is summed up in the most repeated comment made about the 1934 French production: “It seems to have been written just yesterday.” Of course, Shakespeare’s language in Coriolanus isn’t as straightforward as in some other plays, which perhaps accounts for the critical ambivalence it often receives, despite clearly being one of the greatest plays in the Shakespeare canon. What makes it fresh is not the Roman subject matters of the dense Jacobean verse, but its ideas.

William Hazlitt wrote that if you were familiar with Coriolanus you wouldn’t need to read the competing arguments about tradition and liberty written about the French Revolution. Coriolanus, he said, is a store-house of political common-place (meaning ideas). The competing arguments of aristocracy or democracy, liberty and slavery, power and its abuse, peace and war, were all “handled with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher.”

It’s going too far to say, as Hazlitt did, that “anyone who studies Coriolanus may save himself the trouble of reading Burke’s Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own.” Literature is not a substitute for other types of thought, but a compliment to them. If we can enter the dream of literature (as Anthony Nuttall said in A New Mimesis) we can see these ideas playing out in the context of human emotion. That is what kills Coriolanus in the end: not the rights and wrongs of the issues, not justice for the people, nor the turn of fate, but the heat of human passion.

At the start of the play, there is a grain shortage and the plebeians are protesting against the patricians. Some of the Roman rulers try to placate the people, but Coriolanus is supercilious and disdainful. He is so deeply committed to the ideal of honor, one of the crowning virtues of the Roman republic, that he has no human sympathy. Later on, during a discussion about Coriolanus’ merits, one of the senators defends him by invoking his valor.

the deeds of Coriolanus

Should not be utter’d feebly. It is held

That valor is the chiefest virtue, and

Most dignifies the haver: if it be,

The man I speak of cannot in the world

Be singly counterpoised.

This means that there is no balancing act to be had with valor. There is no counter-argument to heroism. After dismissing the people, Coriolanus goes to war and defeats the Volscians, a group threatening to invade Rome. In reward, he is made a Consul.

Now, tradition says he must ask the approval of the people. Coriolanus is too proud to do this. In the argument that follows, he displays bare contempt for the people and is exiled from Rome for his tyrannous intent. (He doesn’t believe the people should have any say in the ruling of Rome.) He goes to the Volscians, whom he has just defeated, and they admire him for his valor so much they take him in and agree to help him take revenge on Rome. Their revenge is for the defeat he pioneered; his is for his exile.

Old friends from Rome come to see Coriolanus to plead with him not to attack. He dismisses them all, even the ones he has dearly loved. At the gates of Rome, his wife, mother, and son plead with him. Despite trying to resist all feelings, he relents. (There’s a long tradition of psychoanalytic criticism, which sees Coriolanus as Oedipal.) But the Volscians are mad with rage at his betrayal. They kill him.

The proximate cause of this tragedy is obvious: Coriolanus radically values an ideology that denies natural feeling. Even when his young son implores him not to attack Rome, he says,

my young boy

Hath an aspect of intercession, which

Great nature cries ‘Deny not.’ let the Volsces

Plough Rome and harrow Italy: I’ll never

Be such a gosling to obey instinct

He is eventually persuaded to make peace, when his mother Volumnia tells him that invading Rome now will destroy his reputation forever,

The end of war’s uncertain, but this certain,

That, if thou conquer Rome, the benefit

Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name,

Whose repetition will be dogg’d with curses

She pleads her position as his mother, and the love and the duty he owes to her, and says “the gods will plague thee” for ignoring her. He is publicly shamed by the kneeling down of his mother, Volumnia, wife, Virgilia, and son, Martius.

Volumnia then uses powerfully exploitative rhetoric,

so we will home to Rome,

And die among our neighbors…

I am hush’d until our city be a-fire

Now he relents. But not for ideological reasons. His mother has finally broken through to his sense of sympathy. “Were you in my stead, would you have heard/ A mother less?” Coriolanus asks the leader of the Volscians. He even admits to crying: his eyes “sweat compassion.”

These feelings do not mean very much to the Volscian leader Aufidius. He is emotionally tied to the case for war, just as Coriolanus has been throughout his whole life. “I pawn’d/ Mine honour for his truth” Aufidius complains, and “He bow’d his nature, never known before.”

This betrayal is personal. When Coriolanus arrives at Aufidius’ house, and pleads that “extremity/ Hath brought me to thy hearth,” Aufidius delivers a startling speech about how much he loves and admires Coriolanus, the man who recently put his city to the sword. His admiration runs so deep, Aufidius tells Coriolanus he admires him more than he loves his wife.

I loved the maid I married; never man

Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,

Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart

Than when I first my wedded mistress saw

Bestride my threshold.

This erotic tone is continued when Aufidius describes how has dreamed of Coriolanus and the encounters they might have had,

We have been down together in my sleep,

Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat,

And waked half dead with nothing.

(It is worth comparing this speech to Clarence’s account of his prophetic dream in Richard III.) Aufidius loves and admires his enemy so much he promised to pour war “Into the bowels of ungrateful Rome,/ Like a bold flood.” So, when Coriolanus changes his mind on the threshold of war, Aufidius is personally wounded. Coriolanus’ downfall is not only brought about by his choices, but also by the pitch of the emotions he inspired in Aufidius. This tragedy is the fruit of many people’s passions.

When Aufidius confronts Coriolanus about his betrayal, he complains of “Breaking his oath and resolution like/ A twist of rotten silk.” This echoes something Coriolanus’ mother said to him earlier. When Coriolanus has to go and apologize to the people to win their favor as a Consul, Volumnia advises him to fake it, to pretend to be humble,

humble as the ripest mulberry

That will not hold the handling

It’s one of Shakespeare’s finest images, perfectly capturing the way politicians make themselves look delicate in front of a crowd they need to placate. Mulberry trees were planted in England at this time under the orders of James I, who wanted to encourage the English silk industry. Silk worms feed on mulberry trees: when Aufidius compares Coriolanus’ betrayal to a twist of rotten silk, we think back to Volumnia encouraging Coriolanus to make himself as humble as a mulberry. He didn’t listen to her the first time, when it would have been fruitful to do so; now he is left with the inadequate threads of humility that have come too late to save him. Like the threads of his fate, they snap.

These images don’t just reinforce the sense that Coriolanus is at fault. They are part of a pattern of determinism throughout the play. All mulberries rot eventually, whether or not one takes the chance to pick the fruit of opportunity while it is fresh. When Coriolanus denies his natural feelings for his son, he says he will “stand,/ As if a man were author of himself/ And knew no other kin.” Coriolanus instructs that we cannot be the author of ourselves. In his indispensable Shakespeare The Thinker, A.D. Nuttall points out that the word which finally undoes Coriolanus is “boy,” when Aufidius calls him a “boy of tears” — a taunt about the way Coriolanus was turned back from his conquest of Rome by Volunia’s appeal. What brings the great warrior down is the reminder that he is, and always was, under the control of his mother. He is not an autonomous man, but still an obedient boy.

This reminds the audience that it was Volumnia who made Coriolanus into a warrior to begin with. Nuttall points to the scene where Volumnia and Virgilia discuss Coriolanus’ son, Marcius, who is a martial young boy. The dialogue reveals him to be a vicious little creature.

Volumnia. He had rather see the swords, and hear a drum, than look upon his school-master.

Valeria. O’ my word, the father’s son: I’ll swear,’tis a very pretty boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’ Wednesday half an hour together: has such a confirmed countenance. I saw him run after a gilded butterfly: and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; O, I warrant it, how he mamocked it!

Volumnia’s response to this dark tale is to say, “One on ‘s father’s moods.” What Shakespeare imputes to us, Nuttall says, with these glib references of Marcius’ likeness to Coriolanus, is that Coriolanus was raised like this — Volumnia praised and indulged his violence. When Virgilia cries out that she hopes Coriolanus will not return from the wars with blood on him, Volumnia replies, “Away, you fool! it more becomes a man/ Than gilt his trophy.” We can hear the echo of the way she raised Coriolanus. Coriolanus’ boast about trying to stand as author of himself is thus undermined by Shakespeare as early as Act I. First Volumia made him into a warrior, then she broke him.

So now we have the passions of Coriolanus, Aufidius, and Volumnia as causes of the tragedy.

Shakespeare is careful to show us that the passions of all people contribute to the final outcome of the play. When Coriolanus is taken in by the Volscians, Shakespeare doesn’t stage the feast where Corioalnus is celebrated by his new allies. Instead, he shows us the servants downstairs gossiping about the arrival of this Roman warrior. (There’s a similar scene in The Winter’s Tale (V.ii) where the news of Leontes’ and Perdita’s reunion is relayed to us through courtier gossip.)

One of the servingmen describes how well-received Coriolanus has been, how the Volscian senators are fawning over him. Even among his former enemies, who he has recently slain, Coriolanus has the powerful charisma of war. It is an irony of the play that Coriolanus is not actually very Roman. Despite his valor he is, as Harold Bloom wrote, “an overgrown child,” and more suited to Volscian life. In his exile from the Roman ingrates, he finds an admiring home:

First Servingman. But, more of thy news?

Third Servingman. Why, he is so made on here within, as if he were son and heir to Mars; set at upper end o’ the table; no question asked him by any of the senators, but they stand bald before him: our general himself makes a mistress of him: sanctifies himself with’s hand and turns up the white o’ the eye to his discourse. But the bottom of the news is that our general is cut i’the middle and but one half of what he was yesterday; for the other has half, by the entreaty and grant of the whole table. He’ll go, he says, and sowl the porter of Rome gates by the ears: he will mow all down before him, and leave his passage polled.

Such splendid writing for so minor a character! “As if he were the son and heir to Mars.” Here with the Volscians, Coriolanus has some distance from his controlling parentage. Some little authorship of himself. But it is too late.

The Third Servingman’s little speech is full of fine images and phrases: nothing is merely told, all is described. We make the inferences for ourselves. We share in the servingman’s admiring astonishment that the senators have taken off their caps in respect (“stand bald before him”) and we recognize that Aufidius’ passion for Coriolanus is noted by the servants (“our general himself makes a mistress of him”) and instead of being told that Coriolanus has won the support of half the senators we are given the splendidly violent, tragic image, “our general is cut i’the middle.” This combination of poetic and idiomatic speech expresses not just the events of the play but gives the servingman a whole outlook, a whole personality. His passion for Coriolanus becomes clear in the way he tells the tale.

By showing us how overawed the Volscians are with the Roman general, we see how his charisma works. And we see that the clamoring for blood comes not just from leaders like Coriolanus and Aufidius. This is the conversation the Servingmen have about the fact that Coriolanus is persuading the Volscians to go to war with Rome:

Third Servingman. But when they shall see, sir, his crest up again, and the man in blood, they will out of their burrows, like conies after rain, and revel all with him.

First Servingman. But when goes this forward?

Third Servingman. To-morrow; to-day; presently; you shall have the drum struck up this afternoon: ‘tis, as it were, a parcel of their feast, and to be executed ere they wipe their lips.

Second Servingman. Why, then we shall have a stirring world again. This peace is nothing, but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed ballad-makers.

Conies are rabbits: it is a marvelously surreal image to think of people coming running out of burrows like rabbits after rain to revel with a war-leader. What an apt metaphor for the herding, political mentality of a group of people full of the heat of war. And notice each man has his own distinct personality — the third servingman makes the rabbit metaphor and the second is the one who has the excellent lines about the “stirring world,” expressing how peace becomes boring to those men who have no time for tailors and ballad makers. The cry of war is joined by three minor, lowly characters who are able to hold the stage just as strongly as anyone else in the play. Shakespeare is dramatizing the fact that the feelings of the many direct the world as well as the feelings of the few. What a contrast this makes with the Roman people, who were inadequate in war.

First Servingman. Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.

Second Servingman. ‘Tis so: and as war, in some sort, may be said to be a ravisher, so it cannot be denied but peace is a great maker of cuckolds.

First Servingman. Ay, and it makes men hate one another.

Third Servingman. Reason; because they then less need one another. The wars for my money. I hope to see Romans as cheap as Volscians.

Hazlitt thought that Coriolanus was a play in favor of authority because it gave all the most memorable lines to the tyrant himself — all of Shakespeare’s poetic power was invested in his cruelest character. And there’s some truth to this: Shakespeare is not kind to the mob. In Plutarch’s account of these events, the people are described as battle-scarred, but Shakespeare tells us they were of no use in battle. Indeed, the play focuses on the idea that Coriolanus has brought far more wealth to Rome through battle than the people have through labour. Indeed, one interesting question is why Shakespeare shows so little sympathy to the people in Coriolanus when their complaint is that the state has hoarded grain from them.

One answer is that Shakespeare was a grain hoarder himself. He was prosecuted for grain hoarding in 1598. Crops were unreliable in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, and riots were thought to be a major risk in the early seventeenth century.

Modern scholars have judged Shakespeare harshly for this. Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her biography Ungentle Shakespeare, said that Jonson’s satire of Shakespeare’s grain hoarding (in Every Man Out of His Humor) resulted in Shakespeare realizing it was immoral: hence, she says, in Macbeth, the Porter says “Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty,” implying that hoarding farmers will go to hell.

This can’t be right. Every Man Out was performed in 1599. Shakespeare sued a Stratford apothecary, Philip Rogers, for 35 shillings and 10 pence plus 10 pence damages, when Rogers failed to pay up for twenty barrels of malt (and a loan). This was in 1604. In 1602 he bought 20 acres of pasture and 107 acres of land for growing crops. Macbeth was first performed in 1606. Shakespeare retired aged 49 in 1616 not just because of his business acumen in the London theatre, but because he was a land-owner, money lender, and sometime grain-hoarder.

In Contested Will James Shapiro defends Shakespeare by saying that this was a common activity in Stratford. Without a main grain merchant, it was normal practice for towns-people to store and supply grain. Dozens did it, including the school master. Indeed, if they had not, there would have been a much worse shortage during the years of bad harvest. Still, Shapiro calls Shakespeare selfish. Duncan-Jones calls it “miserly.”

In Coriolanus the people are angry that the state has hoarded grain. But it is not clear that Shakespeare agrees with them. Katherine Duncan-Jones and James Shapiro left this out of their accounts. Nor do they mention that in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith defended grain hoarders, because hoarding was usually welfare maximizing: when crops yields were low, hoarders were useful. Giving in to popular demands not to hoard would have been bad policy. Coriolanus does not argue against this. As Frank Kermode wrote in the Riverside Shakespeare, “Shakespeare pays more attention to the characteristic fickleness of the mob, and to their dangerous demands, than to their needs; he does not deny the members of the crowd sense and even generosity, but he will not represent their factiousness as the legitimate protest of a starving populace.”

This ambivalence about grain hoarding has to be remembered in the scene where Shakespeare gave plenty of vital imagery to ordinary servants who show as much blood lust as anyone in the play. The Roman people are an unsympathetically handled mob; the Volscians are a war-like gang.

Hazlitt was right when he said that this play reveals that, “We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.” This is what Shakespeare dramatizes, from Volumnia to the servingmen — a society where the love and admiration for power in ourselves and others has taken root in so many hearts and minds.

Of course, no-one thinks that the power of a great leader will make him into a slave, just as Coriolanus is blind to the fact that he becomes a heartless tyrant. But one of the lessons of Coriolanus is that our own passions, our own feelings, are part of the way the polity works. We cannot only blame our leaders, just as our leaders cannot excuse themselves with speeches about how they are not the authors of themselves. The determinism of Coriolanus’ tragedy runs deep — it comes out of his childhood and is rooted in the behavior of the populace.

Nor are his opponents vindicated. The elites in Rome all talk as if they are afraid of Coriolanus becoming a tyrant. But what do they do? Their appeasement of the mob is confused and inadequate. Rather than calming tensions, they stoke them. It is perfectly obvious to everyone other than Coriolanus’ colleagues that inciting the mob against him will not end well. What did they expect of his exile? A peaceful retirement? There is an enabling inadequacy about the Roman opposition to Coriolanus that pervades the play.

Coriolanus’ charisma distracts everyone, himself included. Even Volumnia cannot control the monster she has created. There is a line in Hazlitt’s essay that sounds eerily familiar in our times. “Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.” It is a common theme of Shakespere’s that our passions rule our minds: at the start of All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena is chastised for succumbing to “the tyranny” of her sorrow. She says a little later, “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie/ Which we ascribe to heaven.” This is a line that echoes Cassius in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves.”

We all have a hand in the violence of the world. This is the true lesson of Coriolanus, and of Shakespeare’s political thoughts. Whatever ideas we espouse, whatever ideology we hold, however much on the right or good side we are, our passions often govern our philosophical or political affiliations. We do not know when the heart is outrunning the mind. What we attribute to outside forces so often comes from within. Human beings let loose the forces which torment us.

When Volumnia persuades Coriolanus to stop his attack on Rome he responds first with an action, noted in a tender and unexpected stage-direction: He holds her by the hand, silent. The great warrior is silently holding his mother’s hand at the gate of war. He is then given a moment of anagnorisis (recognition). In Nuttall’s words “he is no thinker, but suddenly, he knows.” His mother made him this way, made him into an automaton. She created him a warrior and thus led him to this point: now she has pulled him back, sealing his fate.

O mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victory to Rome;

But, for your son,—believe it, O, believe it,

Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,

If not most mortal to him.

Coriolanus is not, finally, the author of himself. So much under the sway of his mother is he that he goes, knowingly, tragically, to his death. What is revealed at this moment of anagnorisis is that Coriolanus was determined by his mother: what is revealed to us is that so much of the action of this play which looked like the result of the intentions and misdeeds of a bad man, now, seem morally confused, suffused with pathos, almost blameless. Almost everyone had a hand in the violence.

We cannot excuse Coriolanus — but neither can we attribute to him the autonomy which he declares in himself. We know that people are governed by intention and prejudice that they do not plant in themselves. This was as true in 1608 as it is today.

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This essay was first published online by Liberties in 2024. Liberties can be found at Cordelia Gilligan and Liberties Journal on Substack.

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Coriolanus-omringd-door-smekende-vrouwen--aac5e01f972ecbcbe8cb21de9000e7c5