Coriolanus: the personal or the political?

Tom Hiddleston as Coriolanus. A quick Google Image search for "Coriolanus" suggests you cannot play Coriolanus without being covered in blood for much of the play.

Like many other people, I benefited from the National Theatre’s posting of live productions during the Coronavirus lockdown, and this week’s play was Coriolanus, from the Donmar Warehouse. Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, perhaps because it has a rather relentless focus on the main story: a highly successful soldier’s refusal to pander to popular appeal, which leads in the end to his own downfall. Several people in the play describe it as “pride”, but I think it is rather different.

In this production, perhaps true for all productions, the play shifts in a rather unexpected fashion towards the end. At the interval, around the end of Act Three, I would have described the play as “populism versus principle”. Just as John Stuart Mill, when he stood as a candidate to be member of Parliament, stated openly he would follow his own opinions rather than those of his constituents, Coriolanus has no belief that the common people could be right. As the play opens, the people are rebelling against the price of grain. When Coriolanus hears this, his first response is “Hang ‘em!”, which does not suggest someone ready to listen.  

So you could describe this, at least for the first half, as a political play. It would appear that the Tribunes were indeed a feature of Roman society, chosen to represent the people. Around the presumed time of Coriolanus (his historical existence is disputed) the Tribunes began to lose real political power. But in Shakespeare’s presentation, the Tribunes are evil personified. They manipulate popular opinion against Coriolanus in a way that leaves us with little regard either for them or for the people.

Yet the end of the play seems to go off at a tangent. Coriolanus, rejected by the people and banished from Rome, chooses rather strangely, and abjectly, to more or less prostrate himself in front of the very enemy he has just defeated, and asks to be taken on by them. Is this his tragic flaw? Was it pride, was it the inability to identify any solution other than black or white, victory or surrender? In a strange kind of epitaph before Coriolanus dies, Tullius Aufidius sums him up very well :

                 Whether ‘twas pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man; whether defect of judgement,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which we was lord of; of whether nature
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th’ casque to th’ cushion, but commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controlled the war; but one of these …
Made him feared

In the end, Coriolanus unexpectedly gives in to the appeals of this mother, wife and son, and sues for peace. He negotiates peace, but is then murdered by Tullis Aufidius and his men. The political has become the personal. Until the final act, I could have imagined this as a drama written by Machiavelli, trying to make sense of the political disaster story that was Florentine history. And even Plutarch describes the fall of Coriolanus as a public, rather than a private event:

Now in those days, valiantness was honoured in Rome above all other virtues. which they call virtus, by the name of virtue itself, as including in that general name all other special virtues besides. So that virtus in the Latin was as much as valiantness. But Martius [Coriolanus] being more inclined to the wars than any other gentleman of his time, began from his childhood to give himself to handle weapons, and daily did exercise himself therein: and he esteemed outward armour to no purpose, unless one were naturally armed within. [North translation]

Thus, for Plutarch, Coriolanus’ flaw is his excessive virtus – not something that would be recognized by Machiavelli, I think. But for Shakespeare, the flaw seems to be for Coriolanus to capitulate abjectly to his family’s request. In Plutarch, several reasons are given for the murder of Coriolanus, most notably “they would not suffer a traitor to usurp tyrannical power over the tribe of the Volsces, who would not yield up his state and authority”  - and makes it clear that “this murder was not generally consented unto of the most part of the Volsces”. Shakespeare has none of this; he moves the political to the personal. In the end, Coriolanus becomes a family tragedy. This gory end, strung up by soldiers, is what comes of listening to your wife and family.