Shakespeare's Coriolanus

In ways, Coriolanus is an underrated tragedy.  It's easy to see, however, why it's not so famous as some of the others in the Shakespearean canon.

What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works.  In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet.  Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion.  After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well.  He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development.  In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture.  Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses.  Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.

For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely.  The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds.  Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude.  He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling.  What good would a soliloquy do for such a man?  Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does.  There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all.  If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person. 

Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character.  It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty.  Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies.  It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work.  Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's.  Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act.  He just does what it is in his nature to do.  If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.

Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies.  Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question.  Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love.  The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty.  When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger.  What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced.  "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at."  Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him.  To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.

Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier.  Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.