Coriolanus

• 1. Introduction

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  Coriolanus is a Shakespeare tragedy that opens not with a king on his throne or a lover in a garden, but with a food riot. Ordinary Romans are furious that grain stores have been withheld from them, and they have a name for the man they blame: Caius Marcius. Shakespeare believed to have written this play between 1605 and 1608, during the same years he was composing Antony and Cleopatra. Together, those two works are considered his final pair of tragedies. At its center is a soldier so rigid in his pride that he cannot bend even when his life depends on it. How did a celebrated Roman general come to lead an enemy army against his own city? And what kind of man is so committed to his own self-image that he cannot survive the ordinary negotiations of political life? Those questions drive every scene that follows.

• 2. A General Without Politics

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  Caius Marcius earns his famous surname by forcing open the gates of the Volscian city of Corioli. Despite exhaustion from the siege, he immediately marches to join his commander Cominius and fight a second Volscian force. Cominius, in recognition of this endurance, awards him the agnomen Coriolanus. The word "agnomen" means an official nickname granted as an honor, and it is the only form of praise Coriolanus cannot easily deflect. His relationship with praise is one of the play's stranger puzzles. Critics have noted that he dislikes being commended by his compatriots, and that this reluctance might itself be a form of pride: accepting praise would imply that others have the power to assess his worth. A. C. Bradley described Coriolanus as "built on the grand scale," placing it alongside King Lear and Macbeth, yet the hero is unlike those other figures. He rarely soliloquizes or explains himself, making him what Frank Kermode called, in Shakespeare's Language, probably the most fiercely and ingeniously planned of all the tragedies to unravel. Bradley chose not to include Coriolanus in his famous four in Shakespearean Tragedy, and yet the play's difficulty is inseparable from its power.

• 3. Pride, Plebeians, and Banishment

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  The two tribunes Brutus and Sicinius appear early in the play as private critics of Caius Marcius, and they become the engines of his destruction. When Coriolanus stands for the consulship, he wins the Senate's support without effort and seems at first to have persuaded the plebeians as well. Brutus and Sicinius then work to reverse that goodwill, stirring up a second riot and forcing Coriolanus into a confrontation with popular opinion. His response is to compare allowing plebeians authority over patricians to allowing "crows to peck the eagles." That phrase is not just contemptuous; it is politically fatal. The tribunes condemn him as a traitor and order him banished from Rome. His reply is that it is he who banishes Rome from his presence, not the other way around. It is a line that captures everything about him: magnificent, defiant, and entirely incapable of saving himself. His mother Volumnia had pressed him to seek the consulship in the first place, bowing to her wishes over his own hesitation, and she will be the one who has to undo the damage his tongue creates.

• 4. The Enemy at the Gates

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  Tullus Aufidius is the Volscian general who has fought Coriolanus multiple times and considers him a blood enemy. When Coriolanus appears at the Volscian capital of Antium after his exile, he offers himself as a weapon against Rome. Aufidius and his superiors embrace him. The reversal is one of the most audacious moves in the play: the city's most celebrated defender becomes its most dangerous attacker. Rome sends Cominius first to negotiate, then Menenius, and both fail. Finally, Volumnia is dispatched to meet her son. She brings with her Coriolanus's wife Virgilia, their child, and the gentlewoman Valeria. Volumnia argues not for retreat but for a different kind of victory: reconcile the Volscians and Romans, clear his name, and create peace. Coriolanus relents. He concludes a peace treaty between the two peoples. When he returns to the Volscian capital, Aufidius has organized conspirators who kill him for what they call betrayal. The man who survived the siege of Corioli is killed by the very allies he chose after his exile.

• 5. Sources and Their Shadows

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  Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans provided Shakespeare with the backbone of the plot. The speech in which Menenius compares Rome to a body politic has a more specific origin: William Camden's Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine, published in 1605. In Camden, Pope Adrian IV describes a well-run government as a body in which all parts perform their functions while only the stomach lies idle and consumes everything. That same fable also appears in John of Salisbury's Policraticus and in William Averell's A Marvailous Combat of Contrarieties from 1588. Shakespeare may also have drawn on Livy's Ab Urbe condita in Philemon Holland's translation, possibly a digest of Livy by Lucius Annaeus Florus, Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy in manuscript translation, and the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Camden's 1605 publication sets the earliest possible date for the play; the allusions to it by Ben Jonson in Epicoene and John Fletcher in The Woman's Prize suggest it existed in some form by around 1610.

• 6. Politics Onstage and Off

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  The Midland Revolt of 1607 was a series of peasant uprisings driven by bad harvests, rising food prices, and the enclosure of common land. Shakespeare owned land in Stratford-upon-Avon, and scholars have connected those riots to the grain-withholding crisis that opens the play. R. B. Parker points to the Thames freezing over in 1607-08, arguing that Coriolanus's reference to "the coal of fire upon the ice" echoes Thomas Dekker's description of that event. Hugh Myddleton's project to bring water to London by channels in 1608-09 has been linked to the play's references to disputed water rights. The play was first published in the First Folio of 1623, and unusually detailed stage directions in the text lead some scholars to believe the copy was prepared from a theatrical prompt book. No performance is recorded before the Restoration; the first known production was Nahum Tate's 1682 adaptation at Drury Lane, which followed Shakespeare faithfully through four acts before becoming, in the words of one assessment, a Websterian bloodbath in the fifth.

• 7. A History of Appropriations

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  John Dennis's The Invader of His Country was booed off the stage after three performances in 1719, its title signaling an attack on the Jacobite rising known as the Fifteen. Laurence Olivier played Coriolanus at The Old Vic in 1937 and again at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1959, performing the death scene by dropping backwards from a high platform and hanging upside-down without wires. In 1971, Anthony Hopkins played the title role at the Old Vic in a National Theatre production designed by Karl von Appen, with Constance Cummings as Volumnia. Bertolt Brecht adapted the play between 1952 and 1955 for the Berliner Ensemble, aiming to make it a tragedy of the workers rather than the individual; the adaptation was unfinished at his death in 1956 and was completed and staged in Frankfurt in 1962. The play was briefly suppressed in France in the late 1930s because of its use by fascist groups, and Slavoj Žižek noted its prohibition in post-war Germany because of its intense militarism. In 2011, Ralph Fiennes directed and starred in a film version with Gerard Butler as Aufidius and Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia; Žižek argued that Fiennes, unlike earlier adapters, portrayed Coriolanus without rationalizing his behavior. T. S. Eliot, writing in The Sacred Wood, proclaimed Coriolanus superior to Hamlet, and alluded to the character in The Waste Land with the line "Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus."

• 8. Tom Hiddleston and After

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  In December 2013, the Donmar Warehouse opened a production directed by Josie Rourke, with Tom Hiddleston in the title role alongside Mark Gatiss, Deborah Findlay, Hadley Fraser, and Birgitte Hjort Sørensen. Michael Billington in The Guardian called it "a fast, witty, intelligent production" and credited Gatiss as excellent in the role of the humorous patrician Menenius. Helen Lewis, reviewing the production alongside David Tennant's Richard II and Jude Law's Henry V as concurrently running sell-outs, recommended Coriolanus above the other two. The production was broadcast in cinemas across the UK and internationally on the 30th of January 2014 as part of the National Theatre Live programme. In 2019, Tanghalang Pilipino staged a Filipino translation by Guelan Varela-Luarca, directed by Carlos Siguion-Reyna, with Marco Viaña as Coriolanus and Brian Sy as Aufidius. National Theatre Wales produced a composite of the Shakespeare text and Brecht's Coriolan in a disused hangar at MOD St Athan in 2012, using silent disco headsets so the audience could hear the text while the action moved through the large space. Slovak composer Ján Cikker adapted the play into an opera that premiered in Prague in 1974, one measure of how widely this least-produced of the great tragedies has traveled since its author set it in a city tearing itself apart over grain.