'You common cry of curs! ... I banish you'
Answering the citizens who have just banished him
Shakespeare · Tragedies
Coriolanus
c. 1608
Roman tragedy — from Plutarch's Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus
Generally reckoned Shakespeare's last tragedy, and his most political. In the early Roman republic a patrician soldier wins a surname by storming the Volscian town of Corioli, but cannot bring himself to flatter the plebeians whose votes he needs for the consulship. Banished by the tribunes, he goes over to his old enemy Aufidius and marches on Rome, and is stopped only when his mother kneels to him; the Volscians then kill him for the mercy. Written against the background of the 1607 Midlands corn riots, it has been claimed by both left and right ever since.
How to spot them
- ▸Early republican Rome; corn riots, tribunes of the people, and a contemptuous patrician general
- ▸A soldier who refuses to show his wounds in the marketplace to buy votes
- ▸A surname won by storming a town almost single-handed
- ▸A mother whose kneeling saves the city and kills her son
- ▸Shakespeare's last tragedy, and the one with the most public politics in it
Scenes, characters & lines
'There is a world elsewhere'
His exit line from Rome
A general refuses to stand in the marketplace in a gown of humility and show his wounds for votes
The custom that destroys him
Menenius tells the rioting plebeians the fable of the belly and the members
The body politic, borrowed from Plutarch and Livy
A banished Roman turns up in disguise at his enemy's hearth and offers him his throat
The meeting with Tullus Aufidius at Antium
Volumnia kneels before her son at the gates of Rome and saves the city
'O mother, mother! What have you done?'
'Like an eagle in a dove-cote, I Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli'
The last boast, which gets him lynched
'The beast With many heads'
His view of the people
Key ideas
- The hero's tragedy is a failure of speech: he can fight but not campaign, and the play is full of talk about voices and votes
- The corn riots of the opening scene echo the Midlands Revolt of 1607, an enclosure rising close to Shakespeare's Stratford
Quick-fire facts
- •The source is Plutarch's Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus in North's translation; the surname comes from the capture of Corioli, and his birth name in the play is Caius Martius
- •The principal characters are his mother Volumnia, his wife Virgilia, the patrician Menenius Agrippa, the tribunes Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus, and the Volscian general Tullus Aufidius
- •T. S. Eliot judged it, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured artistic success, above Hamlet
- •Beethoven's Coriolan Overture (1807) is based not on Shakespeare but on a play by Heinrich Joseph von Collin
- •A 1933–34 production at the Comédie-Française in Paris was taken as an attack on the Third Republic and contributed to the riots of February 1934
- •Bertolt Brecht left an unfinished Marxist adaptation, staged by the Berliner Ensemble after his death
- •Ralph Fiennes directed and starred in a 2011 film version set in a modern Balkan-style war, with Gerard Butler as Aufidius and Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia
- •The play survives only in the First Folio, where it is placed first among the tragedies
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — Coriolanus
- Philip Brockbank (ed.) — Coriolanus (The Arden Shakespeare)