We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
One tries to transcend something in order to escape it, to dominate it, or to turn it into one's slave. The ambiguity inherent in any attempt to transcend is the obvious fact that one must transcend something; the relation between the two “positions” is therefore dialectical—both are as it were defined against and thus tied to each other. The Christian's fight to bring the body into subjection to the soul, by which the soul may “transcend” the body, illuminates nothing so much as the usurpation of the soul's attention by the body: the soul's activity is controlled by the body in its very attempt to negate this control. Between persons, parties, and nations transcendence takes the form of a power-play, yet the story is the same. Snobbery is an even clearer example and has its most explicit and radical paradigm in the master-slave relationship. The snob and the one he is snobbish to (transcends, dominates) both share the same system of values, that is, both value being “in,” although only one has achieved that envied status. In other words, the snob can only define himself against those before whom he parades his superiority, and so, paradoxically, we can say that the snob needs these to the exact degree that he wishes to reject them. Those below him, the slaves whom the “master” beats, are like him insofar as they want to be “in” so that they too can “beat” those below them as they themselves have been beaten. They both love and hate the master: love him because they want to be like him and hate him because they are not and are beaten by him. Likewise the master both “loves” and hates his slaves, insofar as the hate which motivates his transcendence is dependent on their continual presence to him as that which he is transcending. If we substitute for social snobbery a scale of transcendence in which praise and power are the controlling values, we will have both the controlling scheme of the action of Coriolanus and a good part of its theme as well.
1 The title of this essay as well as the approach employed in it were suggested by Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1954). After my article was completed and accepted for publication Mr. Burke published “Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction” in The Hudson Review, xix (Summer 1966). The substance of the article is oblique to mine, concerning the play as a ritual of catharsis and purgation, but the dialectical framework of his consideration is such that our articles complement each other. Indeed, in a footnote he sums up the whole tenor of my own criticism: “Since he got his name ‘Coriolanus’ from his role in the destruction of Corioli, had he persisted in his campaign against Rome he could have been called none other than ‘Romanus‘!” (p. 197). The edition used is The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).
2 Two interesting analyses of this perversion in Dostoyevsky and Proust respectively are Edward Wasiolek, “Aut Caesar, Aut Nihil: A Study of Dostoevsky's Moral Dialectic,” PMLA, lxxviii (1963), 89–97, and René Girard's “Introduction” to his Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962).
3 Una Ellis-Fermor, for example, speaks of Coriolanus' “hidden self, so blinded and incomplete [is] his self-knowledge,” Shakespeare the Dramatist, ed. Kenneth Muir (London, 1961), p. 76. A. C. Bradley notes that Coriolanus' feeling for his mother as well as his inward conflicts are veiled from us. Cf. his British Academy Lecture Coriolanus (New York, 1912), p. 5.
4 Arthur Sewell, Character and Society in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1951), p. 15; Una Ellis-Fermor (op. cit.) has fully recognized this problem as regards the character of Coriolanus and gives an interesting solution; see, e.g., pp. 60–61.
5 I. R. Browning in “Coriolanus: Boy of Tears,” Essays in Criticism, v (1955), 18–31, is the only critic I found who has seen the full significance of this speech for an interpretation of Coriolanus' character. His analysis of Coriolanus' psychology is similar to my own: “Could Coriolanus, then, say 'Rome lov'd me'? Hardly. Yet it is plain that he expected to be loved, else why should he feel his banishment so keenly—as keenly as Lear feels his rejection by his daughters? We are forced to conclude that Coriolanus expected to be loved by the citizens of Rome, despite his seeming 'to affect the malice and displeasure of the people'” (p. 23).
6 E.g., G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (Oxford, 1931), pp. 168–169; Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, Fifth Series: Coriolanus (London, 1947), pp. 15–16. But see L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare and Political Wisdom: A Note on the Personalism of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus,” Sewanee Review, lxi (1953), 43–55. There is nothing in Plutarch of Coriolanus' continued refusal of honors; all we have is this: “So in the end he [Cominius] willed Martius that he should choose out of all the horses they had taken of their enemies, and of all the goods they had won (whereof there was great store) ten of every sort, which he liked best before any distribution should be made to other. … But Martius, stepping forth, told the Consul he most thankfully accepted the gift of his horse, and was a glad man besides, that his service had deserved his general's commendation: and as for his other offer, which was rather a mercenary reward, than an honourable recompense, he would none of it, but was contented to have his equal part with other soldiers.” Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (New York, 1909), ii, 152–153. Though there is no self-consciousness indicated here, the suggestion for such might have come from Plutarch's comment a little later, on the soldiers' reaction to Coriolanus' modesty: “For even they themselves, that did somewhat malice and envy his glory, to see him thus honoured and passingly praised, did think him so much the more worthy of an honourable recompense for his valiant service, as the more carelessly he refused the great offer made him for his profit: and they esteemed more the virtue that was in him, that made him refuse such rewards, than that which made them to be offered him, as unto a worthy person” (pp. 153–154). Simply make Coriolanus conscious of such a reaction and we have the character as Shakespeare presents him to us.
7 I. R. Browning (p. 24) notes a similar situation in Coriolanus' opening attack on the people in Act i, scene i: “The harping on trust—'He that trusts to you,' 'He that depends / Upon your favors,' 'Hang ye! trust ye?'—and the shrill refusal to do so, declare plainly enough that Coriolanus does depend on their good opinion. It is equally plain that that dependence is a matter for acute self-dissatisfaction.”
8 The Third Servant (iv.v.218–219). Cominius says “Stand fast; / We have as many friends as enemies” (iii.i. 231–232), and later (v.i.23–28) reports that Coriolanus will not take time in his conquest of Rome to distinguish his friends from his enemies, “For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt / And still to nose th' offence.”
9 Willard Farnham in Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley, Calif., 1936) assumes that democracy as a form of government is under attack in the play (pp. 232–235), as does Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (New York, 1943), p. 203. John E. Phillips in The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York, 1940) holds substantially the same view (p. 148), but later (p. 153) opts for a more balanced view.
10 See the first and last sentences of Bacon's essay “Of Faction”: “Many have an opinion not wise, that for a prince to govern his estate, or for a great person to govern his proceedings, according to the respect of factions is a principal part of policy; whereas contrariwise, the chiefest wisdom is either in ordering those things which are general, and wherein men of several factions do nevertheless agree, or in dealing with correspondence to particular persons, one by one.” “The motions of factions under kings ought to be like the motions (as the astronomers speak) of the inferior orbs, which may have their proper motions, but yet still are quietly carried by the higher motion of the primium mobile” (1625), Sidney Warhaft, Francis Bacon: A Selection of Bis Works (Toronto, 1965), pp. 175, 177.
11 “But he looking about him, and seeing he was entered the city with very few men to help him …” Shakespeare's Plutarch, p. 149.
12 F. N. Lees, “Coriolanus, Aristotle, and Bacon,” RES, i (n.s.) (1950), 114–125.
13 Some editors (Tucker Brooke, e.g., Yale Shakespeare) find this line inexplicable in Coriolanus' mouth and give it to a soldier. There is no reason to go against the Folio reading, once we understand the essential egoism which lies behind this momentary surrender of selfhood to the adulation of his soldiers.
14 See Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form (New York, 1957), pp. 49–50, for this interesting critical tool.
15 The source of Volumnia's control over her son is faintly suggested in one passage: “But Marius thinking all due to his mother, that had been also due to his father if he had lived: did not only content to rejoice and honour her, but at her desire took a wife also, by whom he had two children, and yet never left his mother's house therefore” (Shakespeare's Plutarch, pp. 142–143).
16 Harley Granville-Barker wonders what emotional process Coriolanus went through during the interval between his expulsion from Rome and his appearance in Antium (Prefaces, pp. 10–11), and surmises a “lonely exile,” “pent-up wrath,” concluding with a “blind resolve” to “take revenge” to fill the interval. Coriolanus in fact oscillates instantaneously from one side of his dialectic to the other. The answer is simple: there is no interval.
17 Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York, 1963), p. 60.
