¹ The disturbance of the tragic tone has been noted by other critics, among them D. J. Enright, “Coriolanus: Tragedy or Debate?” ETC, iv (Jan. 1945), 15; John Middleton Murry, “Coriolanus,” Discoveries (London, 1924), pp.265–266; and Norman A. Brittin, “Coriolanus, Alceste, and Dramatic Genres,” PMLA, LXXI (Sept. 1956), 801–804. These critics do not associate the comic elements with the theme and vision of the play. Shaw called the play Shakespeare's greatest comedy.

² Other critics concerned with Shakespeare's use of the concept of honour are L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (London, 1959), who says that honour, divorced from “bosom's truth,” brings about a “wanton disregard for the values that form the moral basis for any decent society” (p. 153). Millar MacLure, “Shakespeare and the Lonely Dragon,” UTQ, xxiv (Jan. 1955), discusses the concept of honour in Coriolanus in the light of Troilus and Cressida. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), pp. 119–144, investigates the dichotomy between a conception of honour based on recognition of service and one based on action taken in accordance with principle, and the compulsiveness of Coriolanus' stance.

³ All Shakespeare quotations are from the Complete Works, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (New York, 1936).

⁴ The New Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida, pp. 411–415, explores possible sources of the Ulysses-Achilles exchange, including Plato, Montaigne, and the Calvinist proposition that faith without works is dead. Achilles' rejoinder to Ulysses' first speech (iii.iii. 102–111) seems to imply that Ulysses' remarks, though attributed to a “strong fellow,” are fairly commonplace. Achilles answers that we know ourselves largely from the way we see ourselves reflected in others' opinions. Ulysses is not content with Achilles' interpretation, though on the face of the quoted speech he adds little to what he has already said. However, the image he uses, “no man is lord of anything,” suggests the nonconventional use to which he, in the dramatic context, puts a relatively conventional argument. That is, he is not interested in analyzing the means by which a man knows himself, but rather in suggesting that one should act in order to create images and assert power over appearances. Perhaps this is why he says that he does not “strain at the position, / It is familiar, but at the author's drift” (in.iii. 112–113).

⁵ Roughly, I agree with Una Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama (New York, 1946), on the structure of the play, and with Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (New York, 1956), on the response to characters, though I strongly disagree with his conclusion that the characters' failures are in fact Shakespeare's. However, I feel that a reading of Troilus and Cressida benefits greatly from the light thrown by Coriolanus.

⁶ Leonard F. Dean, “Voice and Deed in Coriolanus,” Univ. of Kansas City Review, xxi (March 1955), 183, notes that the multiplication of voice images stresses the hero's inability to go beyond two alternatives—to be arrogant and honest, or insincerely popular. Thus, in suing for voices, he separates the voice from the deed. James L. Calderwood, “Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words,” SEL, vi (Spring 1966), discusses the nothingness that results from the divorce of word and meaning.

⁷ Huntington Brown, “Enter the Shakespearean Tragic Hero,” EIC, in (July 1953), 287–288, says that the play's lack of soliloquies shows the hero's incapacity for anguish. The same might be said of this missing scene. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, n (Princeton, N. J., 1952), 157, pictures a “haggard, hardly recognizable figure” before the gates of Corioles in order to supply this deficiency, but I think Shakespeare did not intend for it to be supplied.

⁸ Many critics have found Coriolanus' modesty suspect, for different reasons. Among them are I. R. Browning, “Coriolanus: Boy of Tears,” EIC, v (Jan. 1955), 24; Brittin, p. 805; and MacClure, p. 116. Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley, Calif., 1950), p. 240.

⁹ Discussion of Coriolanus' potentiality to be a traitor are to be found in Farnham, pp. 255 f. ; G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, 1937), p. 184; among others.

¹⁰ Many critics see the hero of this play as a boy. Edwin Honig, “Sejanus and Coriolanus: A Study in Alienation,” MLQ, xviii (Dec. 1957), 408, says that he is a morally arrested adolescent who can understand only obedience to his mother. And L. C. Knights, Poetry and Politics and the English Tradition (London, 1954), p. 14, remarks that Coriolanus' false antithesis of steel to parasites' silk, of warriors to eunuchs, show him to be a “boy.”

¹¹ Michael McCanles, “The Dialectic of Transcendence in Shakespeare's Coriolanus,” ? M LA, LXXXII (March 1967), 44–53, gives excellent insight into the contradictions involved in Coriolanus' stance toward the world, as well as into the effect of the whole play, and notes that in Volumnia we see “The topmost rung of the scale of transcendence” (p. 52). McCanles' article, which was published when mine was nearly completed, uses many of the same concepts and points of reference. However, because I am also concerned with an aspect of Coriolanus that is violated by the transcendence dialectic and the way in which this modifies the whole impact and form of the play, I believe that our views are complementary.

¹² Charles Mitchell, “Coriolanus: Power as Honor,” SS, i (1965), 199–226, discusses this aspect of Coriolanus.

¹³ I disagree with critics who, like Brents Stirling, The Populace in Shakespeare (New York, 1949), find a great deal of the play's impact residing in the political background, and with those who, like James Emerson Phillip, Jr., The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York, 1940), John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (New York, 1948), M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (London, 1910), interpret Shakespeare's changes in the sources as reflection of Shakespeare's need for dramatic emphasis or his political partisanship. The political background is important, but for different reasons. See below.

¹⁴ Dean, p. 184, says that Coriolanus here rises to the vision of the whole play. In a sense this is true (see below), but Coriolanus does not see his own inner debacle that provides the play's bitter impact.

¹⁵ Brittin, p. 804, calls Coriolanus a “humour” character because “he is in the hands of his deformity, a machine in the control of his ‘humour’.”

¹⁶ Macbeth's evil actions cause him to perceive a meaningless world: “sound and fury signifying nothing,” but his action reflects not the kind of man he would like to be—quite the reverse—but those things he really wants. His continual and agonizing awareness allows us to take him at his own word and makes his universe meaningful to us, even while his action makes it meaningless to him. Seen in this light, King Lear is the most shattering of the tragedies, for it shows us a man whose agonizing achievement of the right to be taken at his own word could not cancel the effects of the force he let loose in his ignorance.