CHAPTER 5CoriolanusShakespeare's Private Linguist

The Man Who Would Not Ask

Do you know people who refuse to ask, say, for directions? They do not want to appear lost. A woman who was once my neighbor had a fall and smashed her hip. She did not use the phone beside her to ask for help because it was nighttime, and she did not want to disturb anyone. She would rather have died than ask for help. Still, we ask for help: We ask for consent, for advice, for clarification, or for trouble. We ask, in various ways, depending on our need or sense of entitlement, for money. Men used to say that women asked for “it,” and to say that of them was a way of diminishing or humiliating them. There are things you cannot ask for, like love (King Lear does not know this). If you ask for money or food from a stranger in the wrong place, you might well be forcibly moved on, your request denied.

There are multiple ways of asking. I demand that you write that letter, and you might think I am imperious. You question me closely as to my whereabouts. Then I am a suspect, or perhaps you are simply jealous. Policemen interrogate; beggars beg. One can petition, supplicate, crave, entreat, invite, inquire, plead, query. One can be a suitor, a petitioner, but not, generally speaking, an asker. There is no office of asking.³ When I ask, I reveal myself to be in need of something, and I acknowledge you to be the person who might give me money, a helping hand, a piece of information you know, and I do not. I show myself to stand in a certain relation to you and to think of you in a particular way. In short, I am in need of you. Such are the ways in which we depend on each other habitually and in everyday ways. Imagine a world in which no one ever asked for anything. It would not be a human world. Asking makes a claim; it requires a response even if that response is a rebuff or a refusal. Asking shows us that we need each other and that can be hard.

In Shakespeare's grimly brilliant, remorselessly inquiring play, Coriolanus, Coriolanus hates to ask. His fundamental antipathy to asking is bound up with his desires and claims to be “alone,” to act as if he were the very author of himself (5.3.36).⁴ He does not much like being asked either, and the play is structured around scenes of asking. This structure appears to be a means to explore, as its central problem, the recognition and denial of creatures in forms of dependency. Indeed, the climactic scene of the play stages the moment when Coriolanus's mother, wife, and child—his kin—ask mercy of him for themselves and for the city of Rome. It is at the beginning of this extraordinary scene that Coriolanus declares:

         Let the Volsces

Plough Rome and harrow Italy, I’ll never

Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand

As if a man were author of himself

And knew no other kin.

(5.3.33–37)

These scenes are a profound reflection on mutual dependency and need, on the specific costs of the rejection of pity, and on the society that founds itself on such rejections. The play explores what it means to be kind to others and thus participate in kindred with them. Asking is related to the things (res) that are shared, in common (publica), and the tragic costs of denying this kinship.

Consider some of the following scenes of asking in Coriolanus. We hear of Coriolanus before we meet him and understand that in the eyes of the citizens, he is a “very dog to the commonalty” (1.1.26). He certainly asks questions in the first scene, but he is entirely uninterested in the answers. Consider his question as he greets the mutinous and starving citizens whose reason for protest is the withholding of grain: “What's the matter? you dissentious rogues / That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, / Make yourselves scabs?” (1.1.159–61). This question does not even grant the citizens the capacity for articulate or articulable speech, and it is answered by Menenius, not by the citizens. It is a question that evinces such scorn as to be almost unanswerable. Ask nicely (i.e., respectfully), as your mother may have told you, if you really want an answer. What the citizens say, in his view, is not legitimate; it is more like a flea bite, a disreputable sensation, a bodily reflex that needs no considered answer because it is not so much as speech. His second question is an insult and accusation: “What would you have, you curs, / That like not peace nor war?” (1.1.163–64). Caius Martius will not put himself in the position of needing or wanting anything from people so ignorant, wayward, and changeable: “With every minute you do change a mind, / And call him noble that was now your hate” (1.1.177–78). The issue is one of trust: “Trust ye?” (1.1.176). Such people cannot be trusted to have opinions: He does not grant them a view on the world or a voice in that world. It is no surprise to learn that he considers the extension of a franchise to “their vulgar wisdoms” (1.1.210) as thoroughly impolitic. From the very opening of the play then, the question of having a voice at all, of mutual acknowledgment, and of political legitimacy are deeply intertwined.⁵

His great victory at Corioles has secured his military but not his political might. This in the form of a consulship is the “one thing wanting” (2.1.195) by his mother. He reluctantly agrees to stand for consul at her urgent and instructive cajoling. He asks that the usual custom of displaying battle wounds to entreat their voices/votes in support of his consulship be foregone. He has won fame by his sword not his word, but he is expected to “ask kindly” (2.3.74) the voices or votes of the commonalty to be made consul. Having won his fame by the sword, not his word, he seeks to avoid a position of vulnerability and, above all, the supplication he must make to the citizens for their votes and voices. But the citizens under the influence of Sicinius and Brutus, Rome's new tribunes, will gloss his “request” as rather a mock than a proper petition, and Coriolanus fulfills Sicinius's confidant sense that “He will require them / As if he did contemn what he requested / Should be in them to give” (2.2.155–57).⁶ What is your price, asks Coriolanus, and the citizen answers merely to “ask it kindly.”

The citizen's specification is simple but momentous. The requirement of asking kindly entails that he must ask them as if he actually wants what they can give him, that he, in short, acknowledge and recognize that they are in a position to give him something as simple as their affirmation. This is what is involved in asking: To ask kindly is to recognize a humanity he holds in common with the one being asked, that he is of their kind, that they are of his kind, and that they are of one kind. It is not surprising that Coriolanus should blanch at putting “on the gown,” standing naked, and entreating the people “for (his) wound's sake” for their suffrage (2.2.136–37). He has won a great military victory, whereas they have not risked their skins; he deserves (alone) and on these grounds to be a participant in the political process (in the senate) without having to ask. In his view, the asking is incoherent for he does not grant them the capacity to confer on him what should be his already. Why ask what they are not (in his eyes) in a position to grant? It is precisely this refusal to recognize them that will lead to his condemnation and banishment. This is one reason Plutarch describes him as “churlishe, uncivill and altogether unfit for any man's conversation.”⁷ Asking kindly does not simply mean asking politely, asking as opposed to insulting, rebuffing, disdaining, mocking. Asking means expressing kinship. It is a revelation of the fundamental shared nature without which there can be no grounds of intelligibility.⁸ To ask at all is to posit a “we” in mutuality. Coriolanus impossibly wishes to make a world solely out of his assertion. Even more radically, he imagines that his deeds will speak for themselves as if no community is needed to voice or name those deeds in praise or supplication.⁹

The play Coriolanus is structured around these astonishing acts of asking: one that so crucially and utterly backfires on Coriolanus's inability to recognize himself as one of a kind with the citizens of Rome; and another in which his mother, wife, and child seek recognition of their kinship, with him as son, husband, and father. The next crises of the play have to do with how Coriolanus, now banished and set on devastating Rome in revenge for his dismissal, is to be asked for mercy. This precipitates the play's most central “unnatural” scene in act 5, scene 3.

That climactic supplication scene, to which I will return, is carefully anticipated by the play's precise and telling focus on the grammar of asking. The play features a protracted elaboration of who is in a position to ask Coriolanus to spare Rome: Who can coherently, intelligibly, ask Coriolanus to save Rome and imagine that he could accede? In act 4, scene 6, after the banishment or self-exile of Coriolanus, an extended conversation unfolds about who can petition Coriolanus to save the city he now seeks to destroy. “We are all undone,” says Menenius, “unless / The noble man have mercy” (4.6.110–11). Cominius's response is entirely to the point: “Who shall ask it?” (4.6.112). Who indeed? The tribunes are the ones who have orchestrated the banishment of Coriolanus: They cannot ask him “for shame” (4.6.113). To receive a request for mercy from them is barely credible. Even the tribunes who threatened Coriolanus with death and have banished him from Rome can hardly ask him to save a city in which he is not recognized as a citizen. The request would have no chance of being received as legitimate. Simply nothing they could say here would make any sense at all. There are no grounds of intelligibility from which to project such a question.¹⁰ Cominius likewise cannot ask because he has already tried and come away unanswered. Coriolanus's response to Cominius was that his petition was “bare” (thread-bare? bare-faced?) given that the city had punished him (5.1.20). At the plea to spare his “private friends,” Coriolanus replies that he would not stay “to pick them in a pile / Of noisome musty chaff” (5.1.25–26). Menenius decides that he is the only one in a position to ask and that he can venture out to plead on the basis of his long friendship with Coriolanus. He bets on the longevity and strength of this relationship in the hope that his appeal will call out an answering response from Coriolanus. Brutus, too, banks on an answering kindness in Coriolanus: “You know the very road into his kindness / And cannot lose your way” (5.1.58–59). Menenius, however, finds it difficult even to gain access to Coriolanus. He is treated with utter disdain by the first watch. How can Menenius, or any Roman, be in any position to ask for anything from the man they have evicted from their city? Aufidius's watchmen, refusing him his audience with Martius, voice this clearly: “Can you, when you have pushed out your gates the very defender of them, and in a violent popular ignorance given your enemy your shield, think to front his revenges with the easy groans of old women, the virginal palms of your daughters, or with the palsied intercession of such a decayed dotard as you seem to be?” (5.2.40–46).¹¹ When Menenius eventually sees Coriolanus, he addresses him as father to son: “O my son, my son” (5.2.70). He presents him with his tears: “I was hardly moved to come to thee but, being assured none but myself could move thee, I have been blown out of our gates with sighs and conjure thee to pardon Rome and thy petitionary countrymen” (5.2.72–75). Speaking on his behalf and on the behalf of his countrymen, he stakes himself in his words. Coriolanus's response is brutal and short: “Away!” (5.2.79). He refuses to hear another word. At this point, we are set for the “unnatural scene” for there is now only his family to plead for the city. Again, in this scene—to which I shall return—it is through the grammar of asking that Coriolanus and his mother are fundamentally exposed to each other. Coriolanus attempts to stop Volumnia from asking:

   I beseech you, peace!

Or, if you’d ask, remember this before:

The thing I have forsworn to grant may never

Be held by you denials.

(5.3.78–81)

You can’t call my refusal to you a denial of you, he desperately and hopelessly claims. There's the rub: Coriolanus cannot unilaterally redefine what his denial of her request comes to. Her insistence on asking, on asking kindly, will force him to confront the cold-bloodedness of his rebuff: “Yet we will ask / That, if you fail in our request, the blame / May hang upon your hardness. Therefore hear us” (5.3.89–91). They are asking for mercy. The granting of it breaks (and makes) Coriolanus, showing the tragic cost of his denial of humanity, and the costs of the acculturation in such denials that Rome demands of its warriors.

Wittgenstein and Private Language

In his analysis of the preceding scene, Stanley Fish has offered this striking and prescient observation: “There is finally only one rule: the word is from Coriolanus and it is the law: it acknowledges no other authority, it recognizes no obligations that it does not stipulate . . . it hears no appeals; it is inexorable. . . . It follows, then, that when Coriolanus stands against it, he is destroyed. It is his own word that convicts him, and it is able to convict him because he has pledged his loyalty to it and to nothing else.”¹² In the chapter title, I suggest that Coriolanus is Shakespeare's “private linguist,” and I want now to explore the implications and, I hope, the interpretative promise of this assertion. (My differences with Fish's understanding of what he calls “speech act theory” will emerge in what follows.)

One of the many thought-experiments in which Wittgenstein asks us to participate in the great workbook called the Philosophical Investigations is the one in which we are asked to imagine a language that might be known to one person alone: “But is it conceivable that there be a language in which a person could write down or give voice to his inner experiences—his feelings, moods, and so on—for his own use?—Well, can’t we do so in our ordinary language?—But that is not what I mean. The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate, private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.”¹³ A series of remarks follow in which Wittgenstein attempts to imagine precisely such a language. These sections of the Investigations have come to be known as Wittgenstein's “private language argument,” and it is thought that the point of the argument is to demonstrate that any thoughts we might entertain as we try to imagine this private language come to nothing and thus founder on their incoherence. To get this idea going, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine that I wish to keep a diary about “the recurrence of a certain sensation” (PI, ¶ 258). I write down an “s” whenever I have a sensation, but I have only my memory of the sensation to go on. The “s” is unusable in a language because no criteria of correctness are available to establish any degree of consistency in the way it is deployed, my memory of the sensation being far too fickle and unreliable a guide. Wittgenstein asserts: “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘correct’” (PI, ¶258). On this reading, Wittgenstein is arguing the thesis that there can be no such thing as a private language: He is arguing that language is a shared phenomenon through and through. The ramifications of this argument are both intricate and far-ranging because they fundamentally challenge not only the picture of language, self, and body at the heart of both Cartesianism and solipsism but also an entire tradition that makes epistemology and particular pictures of knowledge and self-knowledge the starting point of philosophy in sorting out our relation to the world.¹⁴

Wittgenstein nowhere uses the term argument to discuss his would-be private linguist. He invites us to see if it is possible to conceive of a language known to one person alone and motivates this fantasy through a number of ways to try it out. That it is a fantasy rather than an argument is central to Stanley Cavell's reading of these passages in The Claim of Reason.¹⁵ It is not possible to argue anyone out of a fantasy, but a fantasy may be expressed, recognized, and occasionally released. This is Wittgensteinian therapy. One particular view of language underwrites the private language fantasy: It is the idea that words might be connected to their objects without my intervention. The private linguist would like, as it were, to baptize the objects in his or her mind internally, rendering the mediation of others unnecessary. In such a picture, language does not have to be shared, nor do we need to be exposed in it. What the private linguist fantasizes in Cavell's extraordinary reading is the elimination of human expressiveness, of our fatedness to expression.¹⁶ Cavell suggests that the upshot of the question about whether we can imagine a private language turns out to be “that we cannot imagine this, or rather that there is nothing of the sort to imagine, or rather that when we as it were try to imagine this we are imagining something other than we think.” Each attempt does not seem to satisfy the fantasy of privacy that the interlocutor craves. It is as if what he wanted was to overcome the idea of expressiveness because at each point in the fantasy “a moment arises in which, to get on with the fantasy, the idea, or fact, of the expressiveness of voicing or writing down my experience has to be overcome.” The fantasy of a private language is about a need to deny the extent to which language is public and shared and this turns out to be a fantasy or fear of “inexpressiveness.” According to Cavell, “The wish underlying this fantasy covers a wish that underlies skepticism, a wish for the connection between my claims of knowledge and the objects upon which they fall to occur without my intervention, apart from my agreements.”¹⁷

The moral of the private language fantasy turns out to be the dependence of reference on expression.¹⁸ If we cannot be known, then we will no longer have to make ourselves known to others, to take on the burden, responsibility, and exposure of speech; to risk our incoherence, inarticulateness, and the pain of not being understood. If others too cannot make themselves known to us, then we are relieved of the responsibility of the claims they might, that they ineluctably do make, on us.

Why would we want to deny the depth to which language is shared? Sharing a language to the depths that we do, and in the ways we do, makes us deeply vulnerable to each other. We would rather not suffer such exposure. This powerful reading supplies us with the idea that the desire to fantasize a fully private language is a desire to escape the condition of being human and the naturalness of the claims of others upon us; it is a denial of our humanity. So the burdens and resources of speech are the burdens and resources of human form. Sandra Laugier goes so far as to suggest that subjectivity is reinvented as voice. The private language fantasy imagines that the disconnection of self-knowledge from the requirements of communication will not lead to the loss of identity.¹⁹ I can say, and know, who I am without others.

Coriolanus is a would-be private linguist because he will not suffer the exposure of being legible to others. His deeds should speak for themselves—as if any deed could be understood without a community of speakers in which such deeds are intelligible. The private language fantasy gets at Coriolanus's impossible refusal of the role of others in his life, their say in him, his inevitable need of them if only in his glory; it gets at the terrifyingly lethal nature of that denial; it shows that the denial of the depth to which we share language is also a denial of finitude and his humanity; it explains Coriolanus's aspirations to be more than human. The idea that language is shared—and to a depth utterly underestimated in standard and more contractual visions of language—is cause for neither weary emphasis, the condescension of correctness, or argument. It is rather an occasion for both fear and wonder, which is enacted in our myriad embarrassments and exposures and in our futile attempts to master our legibility and our fantasies that we are either fundamentally unknowable, or perfectly knowable without the aid of others. The private language fantasy is lived in Coriolanus's willful, violent, and indefatigable extremism, and in his attempt at invulnerability, which is to say inhumanity. The fantasy is visible in the other late great tragedies and more mundanely in the psychic elimination of others that funds this desire.²⁰

It might at first seem entirely counterintuitive to claim that Coriolanus, of all people, is a would-be private linguist. After all, no hero of Shakespearean tragedy is reputed to have less inner life, less psychic complexity than Coriolanus. He is a man of action and lives in a city of swords not words. He is a killing machine; self-designedly and deliberately thoughtless. Although the word alone is one of his favorites, we never see him alone. “We’ll hear naught from Rome in private” (5.3.93), he says, and indeed he hears nothing in private and says nothing in private save the brief lines in act 4, scene 3, as he approaches Antium, a city in which he made widows, and a few lines later meditating on the depth of his hatred toward friends fast sworn. The setting of the play is, as Robert Miola, Paul Cantor, and Gail Kern Paster have argued, relentlessly public and carefully delineated.²¹ Cavell's analysis of Wittgenstein's remarks might help us see that Coriolanus craves metaphysical not empirical privacy. He would like to evade his exposure in word and expression, and this is a standing skeptical temptation. The impoverishment of his inner life is related to the impoverishment of his political life because to grow in self-knowledge is at the same time to find and form the knowledge of the membership of the community you inhabit.²² The fact is that Coriolanus has an impoverished inner life but not because he is a fully public creature. He has an impoverished inner life because he has an impoverished public and political life. Self-knowledge, as Wittgenstein makes clear in the Investigations, does not come about through the solitary introspection of the minds internal objects, but rather by seeing oneself in a variety of situations with others. If your world is made up of your assertions, then you are unlikely to be able to learn anything from others, and you are unlikely to ever be able to receive a view on yourself from them. (Conversely, if, as Shakespeare portrays the citizens, you readily submerge and drown your voice in the voice of others, you will also never discover who you are or of what you are capable.) Linguistic competence and ethical competence go hand in hand. Before he is banished and exiled from the city of Rome, he has exiled himself from the city of words: “I fled from words,” (2.2.70).

Cavell's understanding of the private language fantasy allows us to see what is implacable and consistent in Coriolanus: His every action and gesture—whether through swords (force) or words—is an attempt to construct the very world out of his assertion, and such an attempt is tragic. Coriolanus is a would-be private linguist in just this sense: He structures all relations with others on a refusal of the fully natural exposures of human form, human language, and human feeling.

Counting and Being Counted: Voices and Votes

Recall how the plays opens: “Before we proceed any further, hear me speak,” the first citizen cries out (1.1.1). The word proceed is nicely ambiguous as to whether the action they take will be part of a formal process or not. Does it mean before we initiate our action or before we rule on this collectively?²³ The same word is taken up a few lines later—“Would you proceed especially against Caius Martius?” (1.1.24), so it quickly emerges that this “proceeding” is to be an (informal, extra judicial) execution. The first citizen invites or incites the group to kill Martius: “Let us kill him” (1.1.9). It is Martius who informs Menenius that another group of citizens off stage have pursued another course of action: They have “vented their complainings” at the Capitol, the seat of Rome's government, and been granted “Five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms, / Of their own choice” (1.1.210–1).²⁴ So there seem to be two ways of proceeding at issue: force (and I will say more about this later) and political recognition. These two ways are at issue for the length of the play.²⁵

The play begins in the first-person plural. This is how political claims are entered. The “we” comes before the “I.”²⁶ It is a claim made by a speaker among speakers who speaks as if for others—not in the assumption of a preexistent collectivity, but in search of one.²⁷ The basic condition of speech and action is, as Hannah Arendt says, human plurality.²⁸ A speaker arrogates to him- or herself the right to speak, the authority lying in the claim, which can be recognized or refused. Instead of being merely distinct, claims Arendt, people distinguish themselves not as physical objects but as men through word and deed.²⁹ “This appearance,” she claims, “rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human [my italics].”³⁰ In so speaking, one inevitably speaks for others as well as for oneself because to speak for oneself politically “is to speak with others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them—not as a parent speaks for you, i.e. instead of you, but as someone in mutuality speaks for you, i.e. speaks your mind.”³¹

It is commonly remarked that Coriolanus is a political play; and that claim is sometimes entered as “it is his most [my italics] political play.”³² The play most obviously concerns the political community of Rome in a crucial stage of formation.³³ In Livy's history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, with which Shakespeare is intimately familiar, the later success of Rome is owed precisely to the successful management of the relation between patricians and plebeians, and Livy's view of Rome's management of the plebeians is favorable.³⁴ That careful management, according to Livy, is what has brought Rome to perfection, ensuring its future stability and acting as a curb on patrician insolence. Machiavelli concurs in his Discourses on Livy. ³⁵ Critics have pointed out the role Coriolanus plays not only in responding to the demands of the commons as a result of the food riots but also in working through both Ciceronian and Tacitean versions of republicanism in Rome's history.³⁶ The play is political in these obvious senses: It examines conflicts over who is to constitute the polis and how the people are to be represented in government.

But the play is more extensively and more properly an examination of the very conditions of political life. The happy confluence of the play's vocabulary of voices and votes can help us, because the word voice designates vote, and thus extends the political machinery of counting and discounting to accommodate not the mere acclamation of seventeenth-century parliamentary process, for example, but rather the question of how we count for each other.³⁷

The word voice appears multiple times in Coriolanus. One of Coriolanus's editors has counted fifty-four uses of the word voice in the Shakespeare canon, thirty-six of which are in Coriolanus (and twenty-seven in act 2, scene 3, alone).³⁸ The kinship of voices and votes shows that being counted is not only a political process but also a fundamental aspect of speaking—showing what counts for you and whether what you say counts for anyone else.

The citizens do not count for Martius and so their votes are not worth counting, their voices are not worth being heard. In Coriolanus's prepolitical society, in his prepolitical head, force is always available in cases in which the citizens are not quiescent (even to the point of accepting famine as their lot). Martius's “we” does not have to be bound together by consent (con-sentir); force is a ready option, violence being precisely the failure of politics.

The first citizen speaks, but we cannot know in advance who is the we constituted by his act of speaking. The community is not the foundation of my voice but rather my voice and yours and others is what determines the community. But this does not mean we decide what that community is as in a Fishean interpretative community.³⁹ The moral of Wittgenstein's private language fantasy was precisely to take us out of the sacred inner recesses of our minds, out of the striving for connection with an unattainable world we cannot reach, and orient us toward the activities we share, the interconnections between speech and action, and the background in place for a stretch of speech to be possible, to the conditions for mutual intelligibility.⁴⁰ Wittgenstein asks us to consider the countless things we do with words and takes us beyond an exclusive focus on naming, stating, or referring.⁴¹ He puts weight on our agency in speech, glossing our agreement in rather than about judgments (PI, ¶241). Cavell, in his interpretation of Wittgenstein, recalls two aspects of judgment in predication and proclamation. Counting something as something, determining what it is (what it is called) depends on our calling it, proclaiming it, and counting it under a concept at all. Cavell, suggests that talking, claiming, calling, and counting are the major modes in which we word the world.⁴² In a bravura passage in The Claim of Reason, he invokes J. L. Austin's idea that the distinctions in our language show the differences we have found worth making, as well as Wittgenstein's “surveyable representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) of our use of words (PI, ¶122): “If to the pairs telling and counting, and counting and claiming, and claiming and acclaiming or clamoring, hence proclaiming and announcing, and denouncing and renouncing, and counting and recounting, or recounting and accounting, we add the notions of calling to account or accusing, hence excusing and explaining, and add computing and hence reputing and imputing; what we seem to be headed for is an idea that what can comprehensively be said is what is found to be worth saying.”⁴³

It is getting at the interdependency of voice and world that is important. Laugier says that “in Cavell and in Wittgenstein the community cannot exist except in its being constituted by the claims of individuals and the recognition of the claim of the other.”⁴⁴

Coriolanus explores with uncanny prescience and unnerving brilliance the relationship between speaking as a fellow human being and as a political community. A polis is a group of people searching for agreement, and an intimate link exists between the human capacities for speech and for political life.⁴⁵

Recall that Cavell had revealed that speakers inhabit the same relation to Wittgensteinian criteria: There is no higher court of appeal, no decisive expertise except for the community of speakers. “Every surmise and every tested conviction depend(s) upon the same structure or background of necessities and agreements that judgments of value explicitly do.”⁴⁶ The criteria Wittgenstein appeal to are ours, and when I speak, that is, voice my criteria, I do so as a representative human. It is the category of the human that is as much at issue in this penetrating play as the capacities of the citizen. You can at any point refute me and say I cannot speak for you in this instance—but then my authority has been restricted with respect to you, rather than my claim disconfirmed. Who can speak for whom is a pressing and more or less continuous issue in Coriolanus, and the play intricately and notoriously relates voicing to voting. If Coriolanus comprehensively discounts the citizens, and is consequentially banished by them, how do they count in this play?

They are given numbers, rather than names. This is the case with some of the other dramatis personae: senators, messengers, soldiers, conspirators, and servants are numbered not named. The citizens are always numbered—except when they speak as “All”—acquiring the number that identifies them by the order in which they speak in each scene. Thus, they are individuated but not uniquely, hence numbers, not names.⁴⁷ This is the way they are both counted (as heads) and discounted, because it is alone their ratification, their acclamation of Coriolanus in the ceremony of the wounds that “counts.” Indeed, in the scenes in which Coriolanus seeks for their voices for his election to the Senate, they approach him in twos and threes as they have been instructed. But they are equally discounted. For although the dramatis personae accords them the status of citizens, and although they are counted and differentiated by number, the play provides us with numerous ways in which they are viewed as a mass, an undifferentiated mob, a crowd in which their individual voices are merged with each other, thoroughly consolidated and coalesced. There is a remarkable plethora of names for them collectively, and they are detested as an anonymous, surging group, the source of threat. What are they called?

In the play's stage directions, they are sometimes called “citizens”—that is, members of a polis (even if initially unenfranchised)—and they are also “plebeians,” “a rabble of plebeians,” “a troop of citizens,” “the commons,” and even a “munity.” For the play's ruling classes, they are variously “the commonalty,” poor suitors, but also the rats of Rome (1.1243), dissentious rogues (1.1.159), curs (1.1.163), camels (2.1.245), geese (1.1.167), quartered slaves, fragments (1.1.217), dry stubble (2.1.252), multiplying spawn (2.2.76), needless vouches, Hob and Dick (2.3.114), the mutable rank-scented meinie (3.1.68), measles (3.1.80), the minnows (3.1.90), and woolen vessels (3.2.10). They do not speak—they “vent.” Their sound is not speech but either the calls of an animal, or so much vacuous hot air and breath but not intelligible action. They are only ever regarded—perhaps most of all by the tribunes who purport to speak for them—as manipulable, and thus instrumental.

In the play's progress, although the citizens have gained the representation of the tribunes, they lose their voices. It is not just Coriolanus's outrageous hauteur that makes of their voices, animal sounds, or hot air; nor is it due to the utter disdain and sleazy strategies of the tribunes whose contempt matches if not exceeds Coriolanus's own and is more disreputable for being so hypocritically displayed; but rather it is the characteristic pattern of the play to amalgamate their voices as one. The voice “all” arrived at by the crowd is no longer the sum of many. It has lost any sense of the commitments of speaking, the burden of articulate expression. One is submerged in all, and “all” banish Coriolanus but do so in such a way that none can feel singly responsible. It is the ethics of the undifferentiated mob who are shown to go back on their word or rewrite it with alarming ease at the promptings and manipulation of others.

Force

I argue that we are offered two modes of proceeding at the start of this play: force and political recognition. In both, the question of being human is at stake. Volumnia glories obscenely in the force of her son, but also greedily wishes her son to be recognized in the Senate and not alone in the glory of the battlefield.

I deliberately sound the word force because Simone Weil's diagnosis of it in her searing essay on the Iliad reveals that the same issues of recognizing a fellow human being are at work on the battlefield as we have seen they are in the polis. These concepts are vital to see how the concept of human being is recovered in the climactic scene in act 5.

Coriolanus is the warrior who cannot be a politician. In refusing to exhibit his wounds, a custom deemed necessary in Shakespeare, although not in Plutarch, he continues to refuse not only the exposure of his body but also the exposure of his speech (because to speak is to reveal yourself to others). The kinship of speaking and politics is again pressed upon us.

Volumnia gives him a lesson in how to ask the commoners for their acclamation:

Go to them, with this bonnet in thy hand,

And thus far having stretched it—here be with them—

Thy knee bussing the stones, for in such business

Action is eloquence.

(3.2.74–77)

Coriolanus, she reminds him, has told her that “Honor and policy, like unsevered friends / I’th’war do grow together” (3.2.43–44). It is not dishonorable to be politic for you yourself have claimed that in war policy can be honorable. She's putting words into his mouth. This is implacably not the view of Coriolanus, for whom swords and words are utterly opposed. He flees from words, and pictures himself in battle-glee as a sword: “Make you a sword of me?” (1.6.76). Whether Coriolanus can be assimilated into the polis is one of the play's questions. First, he is banished by the tribunes and the plebeians, then set on war with his own people, and finally sacrificed for the safety and peace of Rome.⁴⁸ Is valor the chiefest virtue, as Cominius claims, echoing Plutarch's question (2.2.82–83)?⁴⁹ If it is, can it be politically assimilated and managed in the form of public life called politics?

If Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most political play, it is also his most relentless in its attention to the counterpolitical and lethal force of war. War is not extrinsic to Rome. The play begins after all, as we have seen, with a riot or an insurrection—call it an incipient internal war. One group agrees on the assassination of Coriolanus: “No more talking on’ t. Let it be done!” (1.1.11).

In her book On Violence, Hannah Arendt shows power and violence to be opposites. Violence can destroy power (the capacity to act in concert); it cannot create it.⁵⁰ This is a useful way of understanding the polis (actual and incipient) in Coriolanus, as we have seen. Coriolanus derives his entire identity from war, that is to say, from military and not political power. Military power is “the social organization of lethal violence,” as Michael Mann, one of its most comprehensive students, has defined it.⁵¹ This lethal violence is woven into the Roman culture of the play, and the play is unprecedented in offering us a picture of the form of life of war into which Martius is initiated.

Rome was an empire before it was called one. It is a culture almost never not at war; militarism defined it. The lust for spoil was an intrinsic feature of Roman war because no separate realm (such as trade or mercantilism) ensured the acquisition of wealth. Political aspirations were central to the warrior caste, and power could be consolidated through means of war, as Tacitus, writing during the days of the empire so pointedly noted in the Agricola: “They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger . . . when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.” So much is evident from a careful reading of Tacitus, but how do men become initiated into war? In Coriolanus, we are given a portrait of the warrior as a young boy. The military man does not arrive fully fledged as “the thing of blood” (2.2.107). What pain-behavior has Coriolanus learned as a boy? With what joy and exultation did Volumnia greet his cuts, his wounds (physical and psychic), with what vehemence did she turn away from tears or grief, and with what scorn? What did Coriolanus learn in learning to speak, say, about pain, his pains and those of others? This is the form of life of war, of pain in Rome. In so portraying Martius's apprenticeship in the glory of killing, the play displays honor as a mode of hegemony, obscuring war's chilling reason for being—killing. In this process, the intoxication of force is primary and helps us to see that the question of the recognition of human being works across the fields of lethal war and “peaceful” speech.

In her memorable and profoundly illuminating essay on the Iliad, written in the immediate aftermath of a global war, Weil declares that the “true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.” Weil characterizes force as “that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it.” Force can turn a human being into a stone: A suppliant pleading for his life at the victor's knees may simply not be present to the victor, may have no presence as a human being. Lethal force turns a human being into a thing-like corpse. If force annihilates, it also intoxicates those who think they possess it. The weak and the strong imagine each other as different species: victors and vanquished. The application of force is double-sided—“those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone.” No one possesses force. Fate merely loans force to the victors; they too will perish of it.⁵²

This is apt for Coriolanus. The mighty warrior is imagined as an “engine” (5.4.15); a sword, this by himself, in joy (1.6.76); a wolf (2.1.7); a sea (2.2.96); a god, “a thing / Made by some other deity than Nature” (4.6.94–95); and perhaps, most chillingly, a “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries” (2.2.105–6). He is “a creeping thing” (5.4.12–14) pupating from man to dragon. He is a “thing made for Alexander” in Menenius's words (5.4.22). Even Aufidius calls him a “noble thing.” When Volumnia declares that Death, “in's nervy arm doth lie / Which being advanced, declines, and then men die,” she is gripped by the intoxicating fantasy that Coriolanus possesses (rather than merely loans) a force that will also tear him down. Volumnia terrifyingly invokes the poem Weil examines in her riposte to Virgilia, who alone understands that the invocation of Coriolanus's bloody brow betokens a wound, not a badge of honor. “The breasts of Hecuba,” Volumnia retaliates:

When she did suckle Hector looked not lovelier

Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood

At Grecian sword condemning.⁵³

(1.3.42–44)

Leni Reifenstahl could not have expressed it better. The flesh (breasts) that succor and nurture are less beautiful, less admirable than the explosive expulsion of her son Hector's deathly blood. Hector's blood is lovely and generative. It is a harsh reversal of death and birth, maternity and its repudiation repellently pushed together. Weil's analysis of force in this poem illuminates lethal violence in Coriolanus, its intoxicating allure masking the fact that force is only borrowed in this poem. The warrior Coriolanus carries noise before and tears behind him (2.1.154). In Cominius's speech before the Senate, Martius is described in tones of awe and admiration as “run(ing) reeking o’er the lives of men, as if / ’Twere a perpetual spoil” (2.2.117–18).⁵⁴

Weil observes that Andromache prepares a warm bath for Hector at the very instant when he is on the battlefield, beaten down by Achilles, because of green-eyed Athena. She notes that the Iliad gives us strikingly moving scenes of the contrasting world of Trojan civilization— “the far away, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those around him.” The Iliad, she says, “takes place far from hot baths.”

And so does the action of Coriolanus. Virgilia alone offers a tiny glimpse of domestic life, but she maintains a stubborn silence for much of the play as if such a form of life is not speakable. Coriolanus's intoxication with war and force is no personal idiosyncrasy but the very prototype of Roman-ness, of the “autarkic selfhood” nurtured by Rome.⁵⁵ The man Volumnia (conditionally, narcissistically) worships makes widows who do not share the same world with her for she can feel for them no grief.⁵⁶

Weil helps us to see that force blinds both those who think they possess it as well as those who are mown down by it. What is at stake for her in Iliad and for us in Coriolanus is the standing possibility of the thingification and dehumanization of others, the refusal to see kinship especially in war, but also in peace. Not for him to hear words that might cut through force, the address of the fallen to those who fell them: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”⁵⁷ Weil brilliantly helps us see that we are bound together in acknowledgment and so the lethal dangers of the avoidance of a shared humanity.

Holds Her by the Hand, Silent

Had Shakespeare read Seneca's essay “On Mercy”? “Of all the virtues in truth none befits the human being more, since none is more humane.”⁵⁸ After his petition to spare Rome has been rebuffed, and as if to continue Seneca's thought, Menenius says to Sicinius that there is no more milk of mercy in Coriolanus than there is in a male tiger (5.4.28–29). Yet the play will decisively offer us mercy as a candidate for virtue over valor. Until the climactic scene of petition, Coriolanus has been able to imagine that he is more or less-than human.⁵⁹

Coriolanus, claims Leah Whittingdon, “exists for the sake of one scene, the crucial, riveting scene of supplication.”⁶⁰ It is the final part of the play's investigation of the grammar of asking, and an uncompromisingly public exposure of Martius's evading, and then accepting, the truth that he cannot live as if he is author of himself. Everything in the scene is choreographed toward the moment that Martius had so ardently hoped to avoid, the moment of inevitable, now undeniable realization—deferred and suspended for so long—that Caius Martius is neither a God, nor a beast or machine, but a human being. How does this scene make a drama of that? What can such a realization come to? Because it is blazingly obvious that he is a human being, the scene can only stage the dissolution of his evasion of that surd fact and the hopes he—and others—had placed in it. Martius's momentous acceptance that he is human is then the business of this scene and the costs of the denial and belated acceptance of his fate as a human being constitute the tragedy that Shakespeare alone made of the sources of a familiar Roman story. But his acceptance that he is “not / Of stronger earth than others,” that he is not autochthonous, but the flesh of other flesh, is “mortal to him” (5.3.189). He knows he will not be spared in the peace he brokers. Being human is being mortal: such knowledge will hardly spare us from, still less prepare us for, the fate of dying. Martius, however, has very little time or space for a life that might be enhanced as well as threatened by this realization.

We might say of this extraordinary scene what Rachel Bespaloff said about the famous scene of supplication between Priam and Achilles in the Iliad: In an “exceptional deviation” from the laws of violence in that poem, “supplication sobers the man to whom it is addressed instead of exasperating him.”⁶¹

Two vital actions in this scene are pivotal in accommodating Martius to the vulnerability of his shared humanity. I choose the word vulnerability with care, sounding its Latin root in vulnus (wound).⁶² Martius has refused to show his wounds to the citizens, and it is a Shakespearean innovation that he foregoes the customary procedure of affirmation. Those wounds show the form of his denial: Treated by himself, his mother, and Menenius as the insignia of his victories, and thus phantasmically turned into their opposite, marks of victory and not vulnerability, he will not countenance the citizens their conventional say in his path to the consulship. His mother and Menenius glory in his wounds, their number, their extent. Every “gash” was “an enemy's grave” rather than a place from which life might bleed out (2.1.151–2). These wounds can be paraded in triumph, but not exposed. Above all, Martius will not countenance others speaking for his wounds. We are offered that grotesque image, continuing the language of the body politic, in which the commoners are to put their mouths into them, that is, speak from and for the wounds: “If he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them” (2.3.6–7). Martius will not endure the condition of speaking, which means being spoken for.

Kissing and holding hands are the two vital actions on which the scene turns. The kiss he shares with his wife and the act of holding hands with his mother in the famous stage direction are fundamentally acts of reciprocity. Where in kissing and holding hands does one body end and the other begin? There in those most nervous places each touches and is also touched with mouth or hand. After the kiss, after holding his mother's hand, how can Martius stand his solipsism with conviction? It is here undone.

First the kiss. Shakespeare has once again transformed Plutarch. In Plutarch's The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus, Martius advances to meet the supplicants; in Coriolanus, Martius must await their coming, must wait upon them. The scene puts at stake the responsibility he might find in his response to them. In Plutarch, he first kisses his mother and embraces her “a pretie while”; tears fall immediately from his eyes.⁶³ There is no kiss with Virgilia. In Shakespeare's version, it is Virgilia who speaks first, a dramatic breaking of her graceful silence, and a claiming of her “lord and husband” (5.3.38). Martius thus speaks with his wife first before he speaks with his mother, and asks her to forgive his “tyranny,” but not to appeal to him to “forgive our Romans” (5.3.43–44). He is trying to hold off a full acknowledgment that his actions are lethal to his family as well as all other Romans. Editors usually add the stage direction “[They kiss]” that they surmise from Martius words: “O, a kiss / Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!” (5.3.44–45). The long “O” implies that the kiss is not made equivalent to exile and revenge, as some critics have argued, but rather counterbalances it.⁶⁴ The kiss is long; it is sweet. Different editors quibble over who kisses who first. Of his editors, Brian Parker, has Virgilia kiss him first. Peter Holland thinks Bevington's similar stage direction to be “more than anything the text requires.”⁶⁵ Bliss simply adds the stage direction “[They kiss]” before Martius's exclamatory “O!” Who makes the first move is sometimes important.⁶⁶ But a kiss is mutual (and if forced, it is not a kiss). It is an open-mouthed acceptance of another, and like a handholding, one is intimately and inevitably both being touched and touching. Caius Martius has lived his life, as Weil says of the protagonists in The Iliad “far from hot baths,” far from anything that resembles the conversation of Anthony with his Cleopatra, far from anything resembling the domestic life with which Virgilia is altogether associated (for she will not venture out of the house until Coriolanus returns safely from the wars).⁶⁷

One definitive gesture of the scene is the kneeling, the formal gesture of suppliants, that Martius finds so terrible a reversal of filial relations, a world upside down that appalls him completely. The acts of kneeling by his mother, wife, and son punctuate the scene: These gestures are crucial inclinations as they bend toward each other: His mother bows (5.3.30) and kneels to Martius a few lines after he has kneeled to her and been blessed. Some editors and directors have Caius raise his mother up, asking “Your knees to me?” (5.3.58). The young Martius is invited to kneel by Volumnia a few lines later, and after Volumnia's very long speech, she motions all the suppliants to kneel: “Down! An end, / This is the last” (5.3.170–71). At agonizing moments, it seems that Martius will not respond. An uncanny stillness falls in this loud and noisy play. Volumnia at last directs them all to rise and to go, their mission rebuffed, their city and lives now unprotected from the ravaging to come. Volumnia understands Martius's silence as a fundamental undoing of the bonds that tie them. She understands that he will not acknowledge them as his kin: “This fellow had a Volscian to his mother, / His wife is in Corioles and his child / Like him by chance” (5.3.178–80). She will not lead the suppliants out until he formally dismisses them as she thinks in heart he has done already: “Yet give us our dispatch” (5.3.180).

I imagine that it is as she turns to go that he “holds her by the hand, silent,” as the stage direction instructs. Jarrett Walker, in a fine analysis of this scene, has suggested that this is the only stage direction in the first folio that puts a stop to all speech and action.⁶⁸ Directors and actors use their discretion here, but some prolong and distend the moment, making it almost unbearably pregnant with tension and possibility. The silence is held (stopped and contained) by the actors on stage: In the auditorium, you might hear a pin drop as Volumnia's hand is contained, retained, sustained, and detained by Caius Martius (detain, contain, and so on are all derivative of the Latin roots in tenere, to hold). What is being held and carried here?

The stage direction diverges significantly again from Plutarch. First, according to Plutarch's sequence, Martius says: “O, mother what have you done to me?” He holds her hand and then continues: “Oh, mother, you have wonne a happy victory for your countrie, but mortall and unhappy for your sonne.” There is no hold, no pause. In the play's extravagant, daring pause, we can imagine all that might be passing through Martius's mind; we might see it on the actor's face. Consider these options: The pause leaves space for the unsurmountable admission that he cannot forgo those he loves, that he must hold them, and that he must protect them; the defeated but stark realization that he will die, and thus his mother's victory will be a hollow triumph bringing the death of her son, (he holds this thought for her because she has not yet grasped it); the longing to simply stop as when we might say, Hold up! Hold everything! The pause contains the cost of holding everything dear; the knowledge that now he is at last holding his own with his mother, that is, he is separate from her, even in loco parentis for her unwitting self; the cost of upholding this dawning truth before it dawns on her, the realization that it will dawn on her; all this and more might be contained and held in the silence.⁶⁹ Second, in Plutarch, the gesture is not a holding of hands but rather an act of detention, a more unhandsome grasping and clasping. Coriolanus is described as “holding her hard by the right hand.”⁷⁰ The play appropriately excises the hardness in Plutarch's version. And this lack of hardness, this softness even seems crucial.⁷¹

Consider what people do with their hands in the world of the play. In Volumnia's awful mimicry of Martius in battle, she acts out his “mail’d hand” wiping his “bloody brow” (1.3.37) Aufidius's passionate enmity for Martius is expressed in the desire to “wash my fierce hands in's heart” (1.10.27) but he also “sanctifies himself with's hand” (4.5.198). In the explosive conflict after Martius's contemptuous “petitioning” of the citizens, there is much laying on and seizing: “Lay hands upon him / And bear him to the rock” (3.1.222–23). When he has gone over to the Voscians, Martius's “speechless hand” dismisses Cominius (5.1.67). Hands are part of the play's synecdochal language of body parts and fragments, so Menenius, punning on the idea of handicraft, can say to the tribunes: “You have made fair hands / You and your crafts!” (4.6.120–21). We are as likely to see a fist as an open hand, as when Aufidius feverishly imagines the two warriors “fisting each other's throats” (4.5.127). On his banishment, Coriolanus will say to Menenius: “Give me thy hand,” (4.2.58). But this is a rare instance in a play in which hands are far more likely to grasp, seize, clutch, or be gripped than held. Hands then are more likely to be closed than open; they enforce rather than offer and invite. In the final supplication scene, young Martius's hand is held by his grandmother, and all their hands are held together in their ardent gesture of petition, supplicating his mercy.⁷²

In the primal act of holding hands, unless you pull your hand away, you are both holding and being held. That is why shaking hands is a sign of trust, and hand-fasting a form of pledging. It implies commitments felt through the flesh, carrying the promise of fidelity. It might be hard to let someone down after you have held hands with them. You feel their warmth and their sentience; you feel that you are kin. That is the kinship I imagine Martius feels.⁷³

The whole scene is predicated on Martius response, and it is this primitive, visceral response to his mother in the handholding that brings the responsibility he now assumes for her and for his family and, by extension, for Rome. Cavell has suggested that Martius's words that end the silence can be read as its interpretation. If so, his words express his foreknowledge with the relentless clarity of truth. It is a truth that he will accept: “Let it come” (5.3.189). The patience, the awaiting that the scene has necessitated, the scene's insistence on the sheer power of response in its actors and its audience, is carried on in the final scene, for there Coriolanus suffers his death, he lets it come to him. Etymologically, patience is suffering, not doing. Coriolanus “forgets his part” in prideful isolation. The voluble Volumnia is silent for the rest of the play, compounding the realizations made through the silent handholding.⁷⁴

A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing

I want now, and finally, to speak about the tears of Caius Martius. For Shakespeare's late tragedies have designs on our capacity for pity as they renovate tragic form. When Wittgenstein explores the response of pity in the Philosophical Investigations—“How am I filled with pity for this human being?”—he is suggesting that there is something imperatival, a call, a claim, a demand made on me by virtue of you being human, that response to other human beings is instinctive.⁷⁵ It is not that he is pointing to metaphysical or biological facts about the human; he is pointing to the idea that we are fated to our human forms.⁷⁶ We are not talking about a scientific fact of human nature but a givenness of our condition that we must either grant (accept as our form of life, as the form of life that it is) or deny (avoid). The condition of humanity and the extent to which it is admitted as common is something of central importance in Coriolanus.⁷⁷

But first, a tale of two fathers: A few years before he died, my father had a massive left-sided stroke. He lost control over the right side of his body; he lost the ability to speak. When I visited him in the stroke unit shortly after the experience, he was lying in his hospital bed. His eyes were closed so he did not see me. He was almost motionless. He was crying—weeping not sobbing; tears fell silently and steadily from his eyes. It was the first and only time I ever saw him cry.

A friend's father died of cancer. He had held off the pain medication to be lucid with his family during his final days. He beat his thigh in pain; he said, “Mama told me not to cry.” These stories of the tears of old men fill me with sadness, the sadness of their losses, past and to come, the sadness that the natural route to such sorrows was so private, so forbidden.

Late in his magnificent book about ethics and the practice of medicine, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, John Berger tells us that when the eponymous country doctor, John Sassall, was unaware of his presence, he saw Sassall weep. He goes on to say that a man or woman sobbing recalls a child, yet in an unsettling way. This, he suggests, is partly because contemporary mid-twentieth-century social conventions discourage a man from crying but allow children their tears. This, however, does not account for why and how we might be unsettled. A sobbing man comes to resemble a child in the falling away of an adult's bearing. His movements come to seem as primitive as a child's. The hands clench and paw, the body falls in on itself fetally, and all seems focused on the mouth “as though the mouth were simultaneously the place of pain and the only way by which consolation might be taken in.” We are unsettled, suggests Berger, because the man sobbing at once conjures the child to mind, such anguish bringing him to that state of childish helplessness, and at the same time, blocks off the child's expectation of recovery and the route to it. The man does not cry as the child does, to protest, but rather cries only to himself. Berger says: “It may even be that by crying again like a child he somehow believes that he will regain the ability to recover like a child. Yet that is impossible.”⁷⁸ These comments seem to me to bear on the man-child Martius.⁷⁹

As usual, Shakespeare gives us his stage directions through the words and responses of his dramatis personae. It is clear that the climactic supplication I just examined in the previous section of this chapter elicits his tears. In Gregory Doran's 2011 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sope Dirisu as Martius takes up the cue. After the almost unbearably long silence and restraint of the famous stage direction, he grasps his mother's face, holding her to him and releases his tears, as if they are shaken out of him as he utters the words: “O, mother, mother! / What have you done?” Those long, round, open-mouthed, and repeated sounds, the largest vowel and most extended note in the wooden O, precede and succeed the desperate vocative. It is as if the full knowledge of this relationship as his can only be exclaimed, expressed, hurled, and howled in this distraught cry: “O, mother, my mother, O!” and in his uncontrollable tears.

In the aftermath of this outburst and of his assent to his mother's supplication for peace, he appeals to Aufidius and asks, “Were you in my stead, would you have heard / A mother less? Or granted less, Aufidius?” He is no longer the man who would not ask. The repetition of Aufidius's name betrays some anxiety: He is no longer boasting of standing alone but is appealing to what he hopes they have in common. Would you not have done the same? Would not any man? Caius Martius Coriolanus has never set himself up as any man. Aufidius grants laconically that “he was moved withal” (5.3.193). Now Martius alludes to his own tears: “It is no little thing to make / Mine eyes to sweat compassion” (5.3.195–96) as if his tears can be acknowledged only as hard physical labor, as earned through exertion. His tears are sweat; he worked to produce them. It is a futile and transparent attempt to make his tears subject to his will. They are instead called forth in a primitive and involuntary response. Plutarch shows how unable he is to control his tears, although he begins rather than ends the climactic supplication scene with them. He shows immediately what Shakespeare dramatically defers: “And nature so wrought with him, that the teares fell from his eyes, and he coulde not keepe him selfe from making much of them, but yeelded to the affection of his bloode, as if he had been violently carried away with the furie of a most swift running streame.”⁸⁰ In Plutarch, as in Doran's production, Martius's tears are profuse, the victory of his body and heart over his will and over his long and brutal apprenticeship in Rome's hardness, the spontaneous and reflexive signs of his bonds with his family and the world he imagined he had banished.

These tears, and the cost of living them, such a vital part of the “unnatural scene” witnessed by all on and off stage, will now be the chief weapon of Aufidius's revenge and reclaiming of his former fortune (5.3.201–2). Aufidius, the first conspirator tells us, is not welcomed home but Martius is returning “splitting the air with noise” (5.6.50–51). Aufidius must manipulate Martius as well as the commoners who now so uncritically support him if he is to gain the upper hand he has never had over his ally and foe. In the last scene at Antium, Aufidius's slurs touch exactly the most vulnerable point as he knows they will. First, he calls Coriolanus a “traitor”; then he deprives him of the name “Coriolanus,” derived as a kind of rebirth in the primal scene of his singular victory over Corioles. Then, reproaching him for calling on the god of war whose name he also holds, Aufidius taunts him as a “boy of tears” (5.6.104). This is bitter. The tears he wept were kind; his pity was not overwhelmed by his wrath. Now they are degraded as “certain drops of salt,” (5.6.95), a refusal to acknowledge what they—and the long silence preceding them—express. Aufidius comprehensively rewrites the scene he admits moved him. His words are a schoolboy taunt. Martius's tears are denounced as “woman's rheum” (5.6.45). Caius Martius Coriolanus is a mother's boy: In what world can this be an acknowledgment of a truth and not a smear? He has thrown away Volscian victory over Rome for a “nurse's tears” (5.6.99). The scoff puts him back at the very breast from which his mother so savagely weaned him. Aufidius reconstitutes the homosociality through the gibes and jeers: “The pages blushed at him” and “men of heart” wondered at it together (5.6.101–2). Caius Martius is newly isolated, but not as the inviolate victor, forging a name in the fire of burning Rome.

“Boy” hits home. Martius repeats the word, tries to throw it back three times, and it is not quite his last word in the play. “Alone I did it! Boy!” (5.6.117). Some editors, for example, Peter Holland in his fine Arden edition, place “boy” in inverted commas, taking up the characteristic way Martius has of scornfully mouthing and throwing back (now like missiles) the words of others. He subjects them to his voicing, and they come back transformed. This is plausible, perhaps even likely, but it should not blind us to other options. Perhaps he is hurling this insult to Aufidius. He's the boy here! (Are we in the schoolyard? Has it come to this?) Or, and I prefer this, could it be a full-throated almost gleeful owning that he is a man-child, that is a man who was once a child, rather than a man who emerged fully fledged fantastically (thus inhumanly). “Boy” then retains the memory of his acknowledgment of his boyhood not only as his inextricable bond with his mother but also as a cry against what Rome does to those it trains to kill.

This is true to Berger's great insight and describes with accuracy the complexity of our response to his tears. To see the man as reduced to a boy in Coriolanus in both scenes is a disavowal and a refusal to acknowledge whatever discomfort his tears cause.⁸¹ They are the tears of a man. They are tears he must, like Macduff, feel as a man. For is it compassion he has sweated? How can he disown that? He does not.

These considerations are hardly anachronistic. Chapman defends Achilles's tears in Iliad against the idea that a hero as great and renowned as Achilles should not cry like a woman or a child.⁸² Chapman, according to Jessica Wolfe, refutes Scaliger's mocking of Achilles for “crying in front of his mother.” Christ weeps and so does Aeneas and Alexander the Great. Tears can be a sign of courage and hardiness; they also can be “teares of manliness and magnanimitie.” The implications are that tears cannot impugn epic's greatest soldier as they might lesser men. Shakespeare's inflection is entirely different, and it is no accident that the play offers us an economical and bleak portrait of his childhood in his mother's famous depiction (1.3.16) and in Cominius's daunting depiction of his adolescent rite of passage into war (2.2.85). Martius's childhood shows that he has been apprenticed in the form of life of force. This does not exonerate him, although it might indict Rome and the Roman matron who has lived by those values. As we have seen Volumnia's “victory” hollows out and even ravages the putative triumph of Rome.

Martius's taunting of Aufidius leads not to a new pugilistic encounter with him. His words are more like a dare to kill him. He invites the Voscians to “cut him to pieces, Volsces, men and lads” (5.6.113) in a dismemberment he suffers rather than resists. His desire is not to overcome Aufidius or to enjoin in battle with the Volscians, but rather to appeal to the truth of history: “If you have writ your annals true, tis there / That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I / Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles” (5.6.15–17) reclaiming his singularity and his name. The play concertedly changes Plutarch to show the citizens not standing by but remembering his butchery of their daughters, sons, cousins, and fathers, prompting their single-minded and chilling cry: “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!” (5.6.131). That cry opened the play, but the effects of Martius's actions have been deferred until now.

Force was never Martius's to possess. But neither was language. His career as a private linguist, as much as his trajectory as a warrior, is mortal to him. Coriolanus is Rome's terrible mirror. It cannot countenance what it sees. Can we?