Garber on Coriolanus

Some of the highlights of Marjorie Garber’s discussion of Coriolanus .

1) With many critics, she emphasizes the emotional immaturity of the title hero: “Volumnia has refused to ever treat her son like a child, sending him out to war at an early age, and she emphasizes her own values of manhood; he reacts by seeking her approval, overestimating her power, and both anxiously courting her favor and curtly rejecting it. The extended childhood in which this grown man finds himself will culminate in his exposure as a ‘boy’ and his subsequent downfall.”

2) Coriolanus’ fall is, intriguingly, intimately connected with his first signal of human emotion and human attachment. Garber says that he is “safe so long as he regarded himself as a monster without kin or a lonely dragon in his fen.” When he acts on family feeling, real human attachment, “he becomes really vulnerable. For this act of simple human recognition he is murdered. It is as if he had to become human so that he could die.” This goes in the opposite direction to a tragic hero like Titus. Titus acts consistently on his Roman public values, and ends tragically because of the horrors and contradictions inherent in those values. By contrast, Coriolanus is fine as long as he remains consistent with his pubilc Roman persona, but once he acts on private emotion he is doomed. The contrast may not be so great as this, however, if we recognize that Volumnia is an embodiment of the Roman spirit, the civic “mother” of all Romans. At some level, then, Coriolanus is still acting as a
Roman in his ductile response to her appeals for the city.

In contrast to other plays, however, there is little of the public/private conflict. Coriolanus is no brooding Brutus with his Portia. His passionate outbursts are more reserved for battle and his male battle companions than for his wife (cf. 1.7.29-32; 4.5.105-117). The tension for Coriolanus is not between love and honor, but a tension within the code of honor itself, or as Garber says “a double code of honor.”

3) Garber discusses the perennial interest of Coriolanus by pointing to Shakespeare’s prescient dramatization of a modern political campaign, complete with handlers, sound bites, demagogic populists (or populist demagogues).

4) Garber points to the animal imagery that runs through the entire play. The commoners are geese and hares, while Aufidius is a noble “lion,” worthy to be hunted down by the noble Coriolanus. At times, Coriolanus is described as a sheep, preyed upon by wolves, which, Garber notes, conjures up not only the naturalistic image of predation but also specifically Roman mythological associations (she-wolf as symbol of Rome; Romulus and Remus), overlaid with Jesus’ warning about wolves in sheep’s clothing. Most of all, Coriolanus is a dragon (4.1. 30-32; 5.4.9-11), lonely and isolated and ultimately banished. As Peter Saccio points out, this isolation begins almost immediately, with his one-man assault on Corioles: “Alone I did it,” he boasts, accurately (5.6.117). Garber summarizes, “More than almost any other Shakespearean hero, he aims at a status that is less like that of a man and more like that of a dragon, a god, or a machine — someone, or something, in other words, that does not feel” (cf 4.6.94-95;p 5.4.15-20; 5.1.11-13; 5.3.35-37). How fitting that his battlefield heroics are described as the coming of “a thing of blood” (2.2). Later in the chapter, she writes, “to be human is to suffer, and that to be aloof from suffering is to turn one’s back on humanity, and to be merely a thing, a tin god.” He must make the tragic choice between pity and glory.

5) The play is, Garber suggests, largely about language, and particularly about the failure of Coriolanus to muster and master the language needed to succeed. He has not “made his peace with language,” and by the same token has not made peace with the need for self-dramatization, for fictionalizing the self, that is required for political success. Acting is simply harlotry and he’ll none of it. Garber connects his shock at the suggestion that he use deception in politics as he has in war with his innocence, his boyish immaturity. In the play, growing up means learning to deploy language and learning to play roles. His failure of speech is tied to his isolation, for speech is the medium of personal relation. Dismissing Menenius with “I will not hear thee speak” is a dismissal not only of his petition but of his person.

6) Garber points to the issue of naming, raised by the fact that the title character has a given name, Martius Caius, and an achieved name, Coriolanus. Which is he? Banished from Rome, he is gradually stripped of all family and political connections, until meeting Aufidius he is stripped only to the name Coriolanus: “The surname has become the man, a magic word, said at grace before the soldiers’ meals.” Any other names entwine him with the Rome he has left behind, and if he is going to be truly a dragon he must be a nameless dragon. When Cominius comes to see him, he does not answer even to Coriolanus, and “forbade all names” (5.1.9-15). On the surface, it might appear that the ending is a return to his given name, to Martius, that Volumnia’s appeal is on the basis of private affections. There is certainly that, but more important is Volumnia’s warning that the name of a Roman who destroys Rome will only live in infamy: “his name remains to th’ensuing age abhorred” (5.3.143-149). Finally, it’s Aufidius’ naming that sticks: “thou boy of tears” (5.6.103). Garber suggests that all Shakespearean tragic heroes are in search of names, not only public reputation, but also “hidden names.”