• 1  Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Le moment historique de la tragédie classique en Grèce : quelques conditions (...)
• 2  John Gould, ‘Tragedy and the Collective Experience’ in Tragedy and the Tragic, Greek Tragedy and B (...)
• 3  The edition I have used throughout the essay is Robert B. Parker’s edition, ‘The Oxford Shakespear (...)

2John Gould explains that this severance from the others in time and space makes the hero appear as a figure from another age, more or less always estranged to the condition of the ordinary citizen.1 The tragic hero thus belongs ‘to an “absent” world, “separated” from the city’2 and despite his actions being central to the drama, the only fitting place left for him to steer his course is elsewhere. This attic model of the heroic figure enhances our understanding of Shakespeare’s last tragic protagonist as we measure the poignancy with which this intractable hero, having proved utterly impervious to the request of the collective others, defiantly looks towards yet greater displacement: ‘Despising / For you the city, thus I turn my back. / There is a world elsewhere.’ (iii.iii.134-36).3

• 4  R.B. Parker, op.cit., p. 45.
• 5  Janette Dillon, ‘“Solitariness”: Shakespeare and Plutarch’, Journal of English and Germanic Philol (...)
• 6  William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. George Richard Hibbard, ‘The New Penguin Shakespeare’ (Harmon (...)
• 7  Hibbard, op.cit., p. 31-2. The italics are mine.

3Critics regularly bring to our notice the many ways in which Coriolanus sets out to isolate its hero, even from his own sense of humanity, a process R.B. Parker describes as a ‘dehumanizing process’.4 Janette Dillon places the protagonist’s isolation at the core of the play, by arguing that ‘solitude’, ‘the essential structural element on which their tragedies are made to hinge’, constitutes the ‘common factor’ between three of Shakespeare’s characters — Coriolanus, Antony, and Timon.5 Hibbard also seats the thrust of Coriolanus in ‘the intense concentration on the figure of Coriolanus himself’ and in ‘his characteristic stance’ — ‘that of the solitary figure, the isolated individual, facing a hostile group of other men’.6 Commenting on the play’s repeated use of animal images, George R. Hibbard observes how these create ‘an impression of [the protagonist’s] difference from other men and of remoteness from them, which Plutarch calls his “solitariness”’.7 Significantly, in both sentences, Hibbard throws the emphasis firmly on Coriolanus’s singularity and solitariness by using the phrase ‘other men’.

• 8  There are 29 occurrences of ‘other’; 2 of ‘other’s’; 10 of ‘others’; and one occurrence of ‘otherw (...)
• 9  Bernard M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Un (...)
• 10  William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, ‘The Arden Shakespeare’ 2^nd series, (London (...)

4The use of the word ‘other’ deserves a moment’s pause. In itself, the word may function either in a dissociative way — thus expressing alterity, diversity, exclusivity, or keeping the audience and the stage at a distance — or in an associative way, in which case it denotes addition, reciprocity or inclusion, as in the compound words ‘each other’ or ‘all others’. In Coriolanus, ‘other’ — including ‘other’s’, ‘others’ and ‘otherwise’ — occurs 41 times, that is, more often than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays.8 If anything, these occurrences reveal that the play undergoes a central exploration of the sense or state of otherness, not exclusively at the level of the unyielding heroic temper — a notion Bernard Knox examined in his study of Sophoclean tragedy9 — but as an attribute or experience integral to all those that Coriolanus relegates to a position of liminality, a position in the city which they occupy so fully that the assembly of others passes from being an aggregate of marginal agents to a central, ‘incantatory’10 force participating in the dynamics of the tragedy — be it Volumnia’s spell-binding lines that prepare the whole city for Martius’s victorious return (ii.i.154-57) or ‘the voice of slaves’ that ‘whooped’ Coriolanus ‘out of Rome’ (iv.5.77-78).

• 11  Harley Granville Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 3, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus (Lon (...)
• 12  Richard Marienstras saw the limitations to such an approach to the play in an essay entitled ‘Auto (...)

5Harley Granville Barker considers that ‘everything’ in the play ‘centres upon Rome’. He sees the city in Coriolanus as ‘the play’s one sounding board’ harbouring ‘the springs of the action’ and concludes that our attention is subsequently made to shift to that point where ‘Coriolanus himself sinks at last by comparison to something like second place’.11 There is, indeed, a dramatic thrust in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that rhythmically draws people’s focus — the characters of the play as well as the audience — away from the hero and their heightened awareness of his charismatic, essential, singular otherness, and towards those other characters that make up the fictitious community — towards collective otherness, in a way that ensures the civic frame of the tragedy itself. This is not to suggest, as Bertolt Brecht contended, that Shakespeare’s play is the tragedy of a city at war with its hero, a ‘tragedy in which the people matter first and foremost’,12 any more than I would suggest that the gist of the play boils down to Sicinius’s outburst: ‘What is the city but the people?’ (iii.i.197).

• 13  Aristotles politiques, or Discourse of gouernment. Translated out of French into English (1598), p (...)
• 14  Aristotle, op. cit., p. 64.

7Such queries beg the question: ‘What is a Citie?’ — a question put to us again and again in the play; a question the first English translation of Aristotle’s Politics also put to its readership in 1598, in the title to Book i, Chapter ii. The treatise offers several answers, amongst which: ‘A Citie is a perfect and absolute assembly or communion of many townes or streets in one, hauing already attained to the highest pitch of perfection and selfe-sufficiencie’.13 Far from playing singularity against the multitude, or the exceptional individual (what one might term ‘the other’) against the common crowd (‘the others’), Aristotle’s definition secures a ‘communion’ between the many and the one. In fact, his sense of communion is more subtle still. In Book ii, Chapter i, the emphasis rests on a shared state of ‘otherness’, to be understood both as a state of unity or oneness — ‘a Citty or Common-weale should bee one’ — that embraces diversity, that is, the quality of otherness or the dissimilarity constitutive of each man: ‘for a City or a Common-weale is not onely founded of many men, but also of such as differ in kind, and are not alike to each other’.14

• 15  Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (London: Duckworth, 1987), (...)

9Aufidius teaches us that all forms of ‘thought’ in the fictitious world of the play is ‘brought to bodily act’ (i.ii.4-5). ‘Otherness’ is an abstract word that never finds its way in Shakespeare’s plays, though the concept, far from being anachronistic, had recently entered to the literary and theological vocabulary of early Jacobean times. A closer look at the theological meanings assigned to the idea of otherness in early seventeenth-century intellectual circles will reveal that these debates had their impact on the play’s varied representations of the community; also, they will open up possibilities for more complex interpretations of the state of ‘otherness’ that do not simply infer a sense of absolute alterity; quite the contrary. Similarly, despite the absence of a chorus in Coriolanus, as it appears in Henry v, and, indeed, the absence of all mention of a chorus in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy,15 this study will show that Coriolanus displays a full array of collective ‘otherness’, embodied by a set of characters or group of ‘others’, or by a single character, the individual ‘other’ — all of whom take turns in speaking for the collectivity in a choric mode.

• 16  Simon Goldhill, in ‘The Authority of the Tragic Chorus’ in Tragedy and the Tragic, p. 246, reminds (...)
• 17  Gould, op.cit., p. 226.
• 18  Goldhill, op.cit., p. 247.

10In asking what proper place, if any, there may be for a chorus in Coriolanus,16 I undertake a study of the topography of the choric group, starting with the citizens of Rome. By topography, I do not so much mean the geographical loci as the rhetorical, social, and ritual grounding of choric ‘otherness’. This implied revision of the very identity of the choric persona in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus admits, from the outset, John Gould’s influential reappraisal of the chorus’s ‘social and ritual rooting’17 in Greek tragedy — a reassessment that has been described as representing ‘not just a retreat from Grand Theory, but rather a comment on the experimental nature of tragedy’.18 The investigation will reveal that collective otherness is not simply an alternative quality or state of being to that of the protagonist, but it is also an elusive one. Its elusiveness resides in the shift in choric roles and identities from one group of characters to the next. Such structural shifts in characterization result from displacement (that of the characters’ and audience’s focus) and dislocation (that is, the disruption of an established order), both of which have a radical impact on the modeling of the choral persona. These multiple fictive constructions depart from the received idea that the chorus must always be played by a defined set of characters. Thus we observe how the choric function can be assumed by single characters, Volumnia, Menenius, Cominius, Aufidius, and indeed, by the hero himself, in a way that secures not only a sense of pace in the play but also a communal, cathartic sense of otherness between the audience, the stage and the characters.

• 19  Brockbank, op.cit., p.57.

11By adamantly refusing to ‘idly sit / To hear my nothings monstered’ (ii.ii.73-74), Coriolanus perhaps unwittingly gives the Commander-in-chief of the Roman army his cue with his awkward exit. In an effort to save the day, and earn Coriolanus his consulship, Cominius steps in as Coriolanus steps out. The moment feels highly orchestrated — a piece of ‘the self-conscious theatre of personal identity and political design’, which Brockbank identifies in Act iii, scene ii.19 The Consul begins his hyperbolic tribute with a formal understatement for emphasis: ‘I shall lack voice’ (ii.ii.80). His anxiety about being lost for words is no sooner shared than dispelled. In fact, Cominius’s litotes is as deliberate as Coriolanus’s outburst is self-conscious. Both utterances emphasize heroic excess, as we pass from Coriolanus’s overstated embarrassment to Cominius’s encomium. The effect is well-rehearsed double act that plays singularity against the multitude, and emphasizes Coriolanus’s segregation from the community: Coriolanus wilfully cuts himself off from the others, by temporarily withdrawing from the chamber and stage, while Cominius justifies Coriolanus’s fundamental divorce from mankind.

• 21  The italics are mine. I am quoting from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes transla (...)
• 22  Brockbank, op.cit., p. 41 on Coriolanus’s speech (iii.i.121-4).

13In some respects, the last line ‘Beyond the mark of others’ comes close to echoing certain phrases that appear in the very first pages of The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus. North’s Plutarch reveals how ‘orphanage […] doth not hinder him […] to excel above the common sorte’ and how ‘in those days, valliantness was honoured in ROME above all other vertues’.21 Whereas Plutarch continues to measure the hero and his virtue according to a hierarchy of men and human virtues, Cominius makes Coriolanus into the living essence of valour, as he shares his conviction that ‘valour is the whole of virtue’22 while the full house of Senators, tribunes and spectators are relegated to the station of some anonymous throng (‘others’) that swell the common ranks of men.

• 24  Coriolanus shares this attribute with another Plutarchean, Shakespearean and Drydenian character, (...)

15According to Mornay’s argument, ‘otherness’ is that which constitutes our individuality. It is at work in each and every one of us. Because all men share in this distinction, it is also what characterizes our very nature as human beings. The concept is opposed to ‘selfesamenesse’, which suggests a state not of individuality but of singularity, where the ‘begetter’ and the ‘begotten’ are but one and the same, the begetter being self-begotten. ‘Selfesamenesse’ transcends mere character-traits like unyieldingness, self-sufficiency, wholesomeness, completeness, or absolute integrity, all of which have been attributed to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The theological concept leans towards self-deification, something Coriolanus may indeed be found guilty of,24 as he strives to disown his mortal state, through a tendency, Aufidius remarks, ‘Not to be other than one thing’ (iv.vii.41-42).

• 25  Richard Marienstras, Notice et Notes sur Coriolan, in Shakespeare, Tragédies (Œuvres complètes, II(...)
• 26  Northrop Frye, Fools of time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Pre (...)

17It may be argued that if the sense of belonging is both a matter of choice and destiny, because it is a natural emotion,25 Coriolanus’s sense of uniqueness has equally, intrinsically, become a matter of choice and destiny, because it is what the collectivity naturally, that is, implicitly, expects of him. By the end of the play, he reaches a juncture whereby to disown the image of his disposition will cost him his life. Not to do so would be to go against his nature. The inevitability of his final tragic scene does not make it any the less ‘unnatural’ (v.iii.185). As Northrop Frye remarks, in a study on the ambivalence of tragedy: ‘The mood of tragedy preserves our ambiguous and paradoxical feeling about death; it is inevitable and always happens, and yet, when it does happen, it carries with it some sense of the unnatural and premature.’26

• 27  Parker, op.cit., note 36, p. 333-334.

19R. B. Parker interprets Coriolanus’s use of the conditional as the admittance of the ‘impossibility’ of such self-begettal and contrasts Martius’s use of the conditional ‘As if’ with Richard of Gloucester’s assertive ‘I am myself alone’ (3 Henry vi, v.vi.84)’.27 Yet even before admitting defeat, the phrasal conjunction ‘as if’ emphasizes, and therefore recognizes, the difference that lies between the self and the fiction of the self. Coriolanus, who is caught up in yet another survival game, finally becomes aware of the strategic gap that separates what seems and what is. Something his mother had sought to make him understand in Act iii, scene ii. He strives to maintain a visible posture of defiance that mimics ‘selfesamenesse’, a posture that the characters, and the audience, consider to be part and parcel of the man; yet this is proving, as he himself admits, most out of character, most ‘unnatural’ (v.iii.185), because to stand for what he represents would be to go against what he is. This is a character for whom being could never give in to seeming. He opposed his mother on this very point: ‘I play / The man I am’ (iii.ii.15-16). Volumnia had then argued: ‘You might have been enough the man you are / With striving less to be so.’ (iii.ii.19-20). A lesson Coriolanus seems to have learnt as he abandons his authoritative stance and surrenders to the collective vision of his mother, wife, and child, and to the supplications not to destroy Rome, his birthplace — all mirrors of his otherness.

• 28  Marienstras, op.cit., p. 1566: ‘Le grand paradoxe de cette tragédie est que le seul homme foncière (...)

20The trappings of tragedy have caught up with Coriolanus. The ultimate paradox of the play, Richard Marienstras argues, is that Coriolanus is made to play the role of a traitor at that point in the play when he desperately strives to behave according to Nature and in keeping with his nature.28 In perhaps one of the finest readings of this tragic scene, he explains that what would be ultimately most unnatural would be not to give in to a natural emotion — the sense of national identity:

• 30  Marienstras, op.cit., p. 1557.
• 31  Frye, op.cit., p. 3

21Coriolanus is not a tragic hero simply because his intrinsic aporia means he is destined to die. His character is also tragic because it is made to incorporate and act out the antagonisms between two nations that paradoxically, constitute the natural grounding of civic unity: ‘L’opposition entre les Romains et les Volsques, enfin, joue un rôle politique considérable […] puisqu’elle est fondatrice d’unité dans une Rome désunie’.30 Northrop Frye might argue that in his ultimate death lies ‘the essential event that gives shape and form to life’.31 Nowhere in the play has Coriolanus come closer to matching his mother than in this function: ‘O my mother, mother, O!’ (v.iii.186). Coriolanus’s exclamation juxtaposes his inherent sense of belonging (‘my’) to his powerful sense of uniqueness. The line is framed by the all-encompassing yet empty-shelled ‘O’ of a character who, according to Cominius, ‘struck / Corioles like a planet’ (ii.ii.111-12), as his Volscian counterparts would agree, as they desperately attempt to save him from the mob: ‘The man is noble, and his fame folds in / This orb o’th’earth’ (v.vi.124-25). The chiasmic and alliterative structure of Coriolanus’s line also intimates a near-to-perfect equation between mother and son: he is after all the ‘other’ in ‘mother’; and she, to Coriolanus, is ‘my’ other.

• 32  Vernant, op.cit., vol.2, p. 159.

23Volumnia offers another perspective to Coriolanus’s valiancy, which according to Cominius has made him into an unmatchable entity, a figure of otherness because ‘something that is other’ (OED, b). She reminds him that she has acted as an organic provider of that condition, being herself the very source of a kind. If anything, it is he who shares in her state of otherness. However distinct the being, the quality of otherness is inherited and passed on. She will not hesitate to interpret Sicinius’s line at its most basic, biological level, ‘Are you mankind?’, spontaneously voicing her sense of belonging to the human race: ‘Ay, fool. Is that a shame?’ (iv.ii.18-19). Yet by reminding Coriolanus that otherness remains a transmitted rather than spontaneous state, Volumnia is only stating the truth of the mean. As Vernant explains: ‘le chœur exprime à sa façon, au héros atteint de démesure, la vérité collective, la vérité moyenne, la vérité de la cité’.32 If the first citizen makes Martius out to be a mother’s boy in battle-service — ‘he did it to please his mother’ (i.i.35-6), the truth Coriolanus ultimately surrenders to, before his death, is his intrinsic relation to Rome: it is not Volumnia, but Rome that makes and unmakes, but also shouts and ‘unshouts’, the hero (out) of the city-state; and it is in his death that the city’s integrity rests. Volumnia’s pleading gives voice to that verity, which was expressed from the outset by the citizens (i.i.10-12). Her speech, which has an impact on both the hero and the collective community, ensures a sense of communion, as the messenger reports: ‘Good news, good news. The ladies have prevailed.’ (v.iv. 40). The reveling community of ‘shouting Romans’ — ‘The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries, an fifes, / Tabors and cymbals’ (v.iv.49-50) — mark her ability to occupy the city, in spirit, so fully that all the agents of the play, from the most central to the most marginal, partake in the dynamics of the moment. In Menenius’s words: ‘This Volumnia / Is worth of consuls, senators, patricians, / A city full; of tribunes such as you, / A sea and land full.’ (v.iv.52-55). Philip Brockbank perceives Volumnia as ‘a processional symbol of “the life of Rome” (v.v.1) while Richard Marienstras considers the character most memorable as a symbolic figure, a city voice:

• 34  Goldhill, op.cit., 251.
• 35  Brockbank, op.cit., p.53.

24Menenius will also attempt to take on this choric function, when he visits the Volscian camp, by speaking of the common predicament of plebeians and patricians alike, thus putting his understanding of human affinities to practical use. After all, ‘You know the very road into his kindness’, so Brutus tells him (v.i.59). As Simon Goldhill explains, ‘since the performance of tragedy is assimilated to the scenario of the sophos, ‘the wise man’, ‘figure of authority’, speaking to the polis, it is hard not to see the chorus of tragedy drawing on such an educational tradition’.34 He pleads for the forgiveness of Rome’s ‘petitionary countrymen’ and begs Coriolanus to maintain the state of Rome whole. He plays the mediator ‘between the apprehensive humanity of the people and the inhibited humanity of Coriolanus’.35 But his abortive attempt is a counter-example to Volumnia’s success. It only stresses a shift in dynamics, as the play no longer grants the old demagogue the ability to sway collective otherness, but leaves Menenius to play the meagre role that he ironically repudiates: ‘a jack guardant’ (v.ii.61).

• 36  Harley Granville Barker, op. cit., p. 125.

25A character’s dramatic status may vary in the play, and a single character may become a choric persona or merge with a set of other characters who themselves embody a collective voice. This is one way in which the ‘other’, with all its sense of uniqueness, shifts towards the state of collective otherness. Additionally, ‘otherness’ also supposes an outside gaze; the ‘other’ playing not only the spectator’s role but also the choric role of the witness. As Granville Barker argues: ‘Coriolanus […] is a character not inwardly evolved […] but seen from without’.36 Drawing from this comment, I would suggest that the play entrusts the construction not only of the tragic hero but of the play’s unicity as a whole to an outside gaze, a witness’s account, a testimony or running commentary that takes on a choric function. It is from this outward stance that I will now pursue this analysis of the staging of collective otherness in Coriolanus.

• 37  Brockbank, op.cit., p. 71, studies the play’s use of metaphors that function in a similar fashion: (...)

27Several rhetorical elements contribute to turning the group of citizens at the beginning of Act i, scene i, into a choric group. The first and second citizens, who speak in turn, punctually incite the rest of the company to join in the debate on the hero and their current situation in the city. ‘All’ responds by speaking in synchronisation and in ripple. To the first citizen’s request, ‘hear me speak’ (i.i.1-2), and to his questions: ‘You are all resolved...?’ (i.i.4) and ‘First, you know...?’ (i.i.7), the answers are delivered in unison: ‘Speak, speak’ (i.i.3), ‘Resolved, resolved’ (i.i.6), and ‘We know’t, we know’t’ (i.i.9). ‘All’ takes its cue from the main verbs that command the first citizen’s lines. These verbs are emphatically repeated. Such ritualised echoes may be identified as choric utterances both because they are spoken in acknowledgement of a single citizen’s statement and because they function like a burden and are manifest of a symbiotic, communal relationship.37

• 38  See Michael Warren, ‘Perception of error and the opening of “Coriolanus” ’ in Textual Performances (...)

28These ripples in speech may take a more subtle and elaborate turn. The fourth and fifth lines, for instance, which most editors assign to the speech prefix ‘All’,38 differ from the initial choric utterances inasmuch as their structures extend beyond the plain, literal repetitions of an idea they did not themselves initiate. Isolated repetitions continue to scan the lines, as when they pick up on an outburst of command — ‘Let’ (i.i.10 & 12) — or of outrage — ‘Against’ (i.i.26). Yet their linguistic pattern seems more personalized. In a transport of emotion and a display or ardent zeal, the lines begin to echo, not another’s words, but their own spontaneous outbursts, especially words of impetus, and an encouragement to act, such as the adverb ‘Away, away’ (i.i.12). They also become the initiators of a theme or imagery that will from thereon ripple through the play, such as the theme of action over words — ‘No more talking on’t, let it be done’ (i.i.12) — or animal imagery: ‘He’s a very dog to the commonalty’ (i.i.26).

• 39  E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘Re-enter the Stage Direction: Shakespeare and Some Contemporaries’, Shakespeare (...)

29E. A. J. Honigmann establishes a distinction between the first three utterances, which, he considers, play ‘an obvious choric or ritual function’, and the following two utterances, which ‘are individualised, not ritualistic, and always sound wrong in the theatre if uttered by more than a single voice’.39 This may not necessarily be the case; for the lines still remain ritualised in the way they manage repetition. Also, their being segmented into two parts or sentences — ‘No more talking on’t, let it be done’; and ‘Against him first. He’s a very dog to the commonalty’ —, enables at least two different voices to pronounce them; indeed, some aspects to the lines would come across better if several voices joined in, as in moments of repetition and synchronisation, i.e. ‘Away, away’. If such short sentences can only be aligned on the printed page, they need not be pronounced on stage in linear fashion. ‘All’, after all, suggests a crowd, so that the general effect of simultaneity, disorder and even noise need not be shunned, especially if we take into account all that has been written on the topical allusion of this first stage direction to London’s food riots of the 1590s and the contemporary Midlands rural anti-enclosure riots of 1607.

• 40  Granville Barker, op. cit, p. 152.
• 41  Granville Barker had produced ancient Greek drama on the professional English and American stage. (...)
• 42  Oddone Longo, ‘The Theater of the Polis’, p. 17, in Nothing to do with Dionysius? Athenian Drama i (...)

30Despite such considerations, it cannot be dismissed that a crowd may behave like a chorus or serve a choric function. One recalls how Granville Barker warned ‘the unwary producer’ not to ‘be led […] into projecting a scene of mere quick confusion, violence and high-pitched noise’ simply because the stage direction indicated described the citizens ‘with staves, clubs, and other weapons’ (I.i.0.SD). The citizens, he argued, formed ‘a collective character’,40 a phrase that implicitly establishes a direct comparison between Shakespeare’s final tragedy and ancient Greek drama.41 In fact, it points to Vernant’s grasp of the ancient Greek chorus as the collective on stage, which, they argued, represented the collective of the audience. In a reappraisal of this model of the chorus, Oddone Longo argues that ‘the essence of the chorus, the essential and distinctive feature of Attic drama, must be recognized in its role as “representatives of the collective citizen-body”’.42 However tempting it might be to apply this analysis of the choric function to the Roman citizens in Coriolanus, because it presents an easy pathway for a comparison between Shakespeare’s Jacobean tragedy and fifth century Attic drama, the leap should be made guardedly, for risk of erasing the greater complexities involved in understanding any choric structure, as Vernant’s study reveals and as will transpire in this examination of the shape and topography of the choric function in the opening scene of Coriolanus.

• 44  Neil Davidson, ‘A History of Mutiny’, Socialist Review 297 (June 2005), p. 8, in which he explains (...)
• 45  Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. with an Introduction by G.W. Kitchin (New York (...)
• 46  Bacon, op. cit., 1.2.§8, p. 14.
• 47  On the ambiguity of the stage action and the address, see Lee Bliss in her New Cambridge Shakespea (...)
• 48  Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Eschyle, le passé et le présent’ in Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne - ii(...)

34It becomes apparent that the word ‘mutinous’ functions as a complex metaphor of social tension between order and disorder. The post-Armada era had in part marked a progressive change in the way early modern England used the word ‘mutinous’, though the first modern mutiny in England would only take place during the English revolution, led by the revolutionary forces, not the army of the Stuart state.44 Earlier in the sixteenth century, ‘mutinous’ was a word used about ‘persons’ and ‘their attributes’ (OED, 1) to describe their frame of mind or natural inclinations. The ‘mutinous’ were in essence ‘given to mutiny’ and by definition ‘rebellious’ (OED, 1). ‘Mutinous’ was, in a large measure, a humour. Like the ‘barbarous, rude, and unlearned’ times they lived in, the ‘mutinous’ were those ‘subject to tumults, seditions, and changes’.45 The sixteenth century had regularly associated a mutinous humour with stubbornness, quarrelsomeness and sedition. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Sir Francis Bacon argued that, beyond nature, ‘ignorance’ was what made the minds of men ‘churlish, thwart, and mutinous’.46 It is in this sense for instance that Martius understands the trope; to ignorance he adds cowardice. He disparagingly addresses the citizens as ‘Worshipful mutineers’ (i.i.248),47 as they leave the stage when the conversation turns to the matters of war. He repeatedly denounces their inability to stand up and fight for their country. That they should not qualify in his eyes as valid representatives of the collective citizen-body call to mind Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s portrayal of the chorus in Aeschylus’s theatre, as a group no more qualified to embody the city in battle than the city at peace.48 In the play, ‘mutinous’, as well as ‘mutiny’, ‘mutinies’ and ‘mutineers’ all apply to the discontented often riotous crowd — the citizens (i.i.SD1), the people (i.ii.11), the body politics’ parts (i.i.108) and members (i.i.146).

• 50  Holland, op. cit., p. 104.
• 51  Vidal-Naquet, op.cit., p. 99 : ‘le chœur n’est pas le peuple, et notamment pas le peuple en arme’.
• 52  Vidal-Naquet, ‘Œdipe à Athènes’ in op. cit., p. 159 : ‘si le chœur est l’organe et l’expression co (...)

36The difficulty being that the ‘mutinous’ in Coriolanus are not military men, but the ‘citizens’. As Peter Holland remarks, ‘though the word meant “A member of the state, an enfranchised inhabitant of a country” (OED, 2), it also suggested “A civilian as distinguished from a soldier…” (OED, 1.d.)’.50 This distinction matters when considering the choric role these citizens may be attributed. Again, in ‘Eschyle, le passé et le présent’, Vidal-Naquet stresses the fact that the chorus cannot properly be associated with the people, especially not people in arms.51 In ‘Œdipe à Athènes’, he adds that the chorus was seldom made up of middle-of-the-road adult citizens, that is, city men old enough to go to battle.52 Yet that is precisely what the opening stage direction presents us with: the common people and an armed crowd. Further in the play, the citizens are equated with those cowardly men on the battlefield in Coriolanus’s severe comment: ‘Being i’th’ war, / Their mutinies and revolts, wherein they showed / Most valour, spoke not for them’ (iii.i.127-29). What is noteworthy is the migrating identity of the choric group from the citizens of Rome to a group of military men. The play already anticipates the group of soldiers we will encounter in Act i, scene v.

• 53  Parker, op.cit., p. 72. Quotes D.J. Enright, ‘Coriolanus: Tragedy or Debate?’, Essays in Criticism (...)
• 54  William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik, Arden Shakespeare, second ser (...)
• 55  William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. M.R. Ridley, Arden Shakespeare, second series (London & New York (...)

41The choric group of men have become locked in repetition and pointless talk. R.B. Parker comments: ‘Perhaps the chief characteristic of Rome’s style is its argumentativeness – in the sense of noisy contention, rather than Enright’s more mannerly term, “debate”’.53 Their subsequent quarrel with Menenius only adds to the choric deadlock as he joins in. The Captain in Twelfth Night would argue: ‘What great ones do, the less will prattle of’ (i.ii.33).54 Their exchanges boil down to what Iago in Othello would disdainfully qualify as ‘mere prattle without practice’ (i.i.26).55 There is no eloquence in words that lead nowhere.

• 56  Vidal-Naquet, op.cit., p. 99: ‘… Composé de déesses (Prométhée), de Furies (les Euménides), de fem (...)

42Because of their infantile squabbles and chatter, the plebeians, supposedly representative of the male citizen body, shift symbolically and join the ranks of the socially marginal, like the gossip Valeria (i.iii) and the ‘prattling nurse’ (ii.i.203). In fact, their collective voice recalls a more classical form of chorus, made up of a liminal community – feminine divinities, women (sometimes slaves themselves) and old men56 – whose reeking breaths (iii.iii.122) prove far weaker still than the choric breath of the embassies, which the first watchman derides: ‘Can you [...] 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 decayed dotant as you seem to be?’ (v.ii.39-45). We note how, at various points in the play, the authority of collective wisdom runs the risk of losing all credit and being excluded from the tragic action altogether.

• 57  Parker, op.cit., 41.

44In order to root the chorus in a civic frame and a sense of righteousness, Sicinius would have Aedile ‘insist’ on the people’s ‘old prerogative’ to approve laws. Despite the linguistic register of custom and law, Sicinius manages the crowd not as their representative spokesman but as a ringleader. There is no morality in the way he takes on the role of the chorypheus or in the way he exploits the plebeians’ ‘legal antiquarianism’, a phrase Parker borrows from Christopher Hill to qualify the rhetorical grounding of ‘the play’s pervasive legal terminology and the Tribunes’ constant appeals to custom and traditional right’.57 He toys with the plebeians’ readiness to fall into a choric mode; but when the timing is wrong, Sicinius reels back their impetus and forcefully tames them into silence:

• 60  Gould, op.cit., p. 221.
• 61  On the Oresteia, see Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1986), p. 55: ‘The (...)

49This is not simply an illustration of the elusive and ambivalent structure of choric entities in Coriolanus. This very bafflement lies at the very core of the choric group’s dramatic identity and ensures the design of tragic meaning as a whole, because it is these groups that contribute to making the audience share in the uneasy and unresolved sense of direction and meaning — a sense of collective alienation or ‘otherness’. As John Gould explains, the chorus is, after all, not a tragic agent. ‘It is rather the locus of an unresolvable tension between intense emotional involvement in, and exclusion from, tragic action: the chorus are both the prisoners and the passionately engaged witnesses of tragic experience.’60 The choric prating of the citizens (i.i) gains new resonance if interpreted as ‘the strife of warring words’, to use a Euripidean phrase,61 and sheds possible light on the tragedy’s return to the intractable. The play refers us inevitably to the myth of Coriolanus’s ‘too absolute’ nature in counterbalance to the reality of the too-easily manipulated crowd. In this last section, I would like to see how the private sphere of the hero in isolation is bound up with construction of the public expression of collective otherness.

• 62  The description of the city mainly lies in the evocation of the swift opening and forceful shuttin (...)

50We first need to return to Act i, scene v, where, despite the outdoor setting, the battle scene in which Martius takes on the city of Corioles in single-handed combat is played out behind closed walls. Both the stage direction ‘Martius is shut in’ (SD i.v.18) and the first soldier’s running commentary ‘See, they have shut him in’ (i.v.19) temporarily bolt Martius within a contained space and away from the spectators’ gaze, thus taking a firm clamp on the audience’s imagination.62 This is a ‘scene within a scene’ made to screen the hero from our eyes at the height of the action. What happens next remains visually out-of-bounds. Martius is left quite alone in action and feeling to construct his own myth and persona. The only display we gain access to is the outcome of this concealed action: the tableau of the bloody protagonist who re-enters the stage — alive!

• 63 Parker, op.cit., p.71. See note 10.
• 64  Honigmann, op.cit., p. 121.

52In the following Act, Volumnia’s ‘eerily incantatory lines’ (ii.i.154-57), which ‘give public expression to a very personal myth’,63 anticipate the choric heralding of Martius’s return to Rome: ‘Know, Rome, that alone Martius did fight / Within Corioles’ gates’ (ii.i.158-59). As if anonymity called for anonymity, the response to Herald’s annunciation is assigned the speech prefix ‘All’. The line plays ‘an obvious choric or ritual function’64 as the Herald’s line is literally reiterated in ceremonial and near-to devotional fashion: ‘Welcome to Rome, renownèd Coriolanus’ (ii.i.163). ‘Herald’ and ‘All’ form a choric group that accompanies the processional advance of the tragic hero, whose fate and the people’s seemed intricately bound up: ‘Death, that dark spirit, in’s nervy arm doth lie, / Which being advanced, declines; and then men die’. (ii.i.156-57). Here, as throughout this myth-making process, the tone is commemorative. In Act i, scene v, Lartius was already pronouncing a eulogy, even before the mythical episode was over — Martius had yet to appear, ‘a thing of blood’, outside Corioles’ city-walls.

• 65  The italics are mine.

55This commemorative voice recalls the episode when Coriolanus speaks to his boy, reminding him of old heroic values (v.iii.70-75). The ceremonial portrayal of the hero ‘alone’ receives one of its most glorious statements when a jubilant Martius cries ‘O, me alone!’ (i.vii.77), a line spoken in response to the preceding stage direction: ‘They all shout and wave their swords, take him up in their arms and cast up their caps’ (SD i.vii.76).65 The outburst looks back to an archaic use of the word ‘alone’, ‘often strengthened by a pronoun prefixed, me al-one (or al me one)’ (OED, 3), and brings to light the ambiguous implications of the compound word; far from operating solely in opposition to ‘all’, ‘alone’ grounds its etymological meaning within the adverb expressing wholeness and communion.

• 66  Brockbank, op.cit., p. 52 and note 1. Reuben A.Brower, Hero and Saint, Shakespeare and the Graeco- (...)

56It might be argued that the choric function in the play is carried through ‘the cumulative repetition of certain effects and experiences’, which are, for the most part, ‘related to the endeavour of the city community to contain its own hero’.66 Alternatively, that it should fall to the hero to take on the choric function and embody collective otherness, around the rallying word, however self-referential — ‘ alone’ / all for one (a dynamic movement ultimately taking on all by himself even if that means sacrificing everything to oneself) — reveals to what extent this expression of singularity also secures a sense of community, of communion even, between the hero and his observers. Such a communion may be expressed through applause and acclamations; it may also take the form of mammocking.

• 67  Parker, op. cit., p. 64.
• 68  Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (London: Penguin, 1992), p.231.

57R.B. Parker finds in Elias Canetti’s study Crowds and Power a possible explanation for Coriolanus’s ‘sense of unique “aloneness”’; its key would lie in a sense of power gained from surviving an ordeal: ‘the essence of the situation is that he feels unique’.67 Yet this sense of uniqueness also corresponds to a dynamics; and such dynamics, Elias Canetti argues, may be shared or transferred from the hero to the crowd: ‘The tendency of all human crowds to become more and more — the blind, reckless, dynamic movement which sacrifices everything to itself and which is always present in a gathering crowd — this tendency is transferable. Hunters transfer it to their prey...’68 The dark spirit that inhabited the ruthless warrior and the sense of uniqueness that he felt with every battle in which he escapes death, is ultimately transferred to the Volscians. Brockbank analyses the dynamics of transfer remarkably: