Yet the play is affected by all the pressures of the time. The great insurrection in the Midlands of the previous year had been bloodily suppressed, but the summer of 1608 was marked by dearth and famine. On 2 June the king issued “A Proclamation for the preuenting and remedying of the dearth of Graine, and other Victuals” but it had only limited effectiveness. The people were starving from want of bread, and it is not at all surprising that the first scene of Coriolanus concerns the plight of the Roman citizens who are “all resolu’d rather to dy then to famish.” The first citizen declares that they must “revenge this with our Pikes, ere we become Rakes. For the Gods know, I speake this in hunger for Bread, not in thirst for Reuenge”(19–22). Yet it would be wrong to consider Shakespeare as fundamentally sympathetic to their cause. In Coriolanus the crowd is portrayed as fickle and ever changeable, as light and as variable as the wind. In what seems to be an unconscious token of his attitude Shakespeare writes the stage-direction, “Enter a rabble of Plebeians.” They are contrasted with the Roman nobles who in a fit of anachronism he calls “all the Gentry.” The tribunes of the people are not treated by Shakespeare with any great respect, either. His opinion was shared by King James, who castigated the parliamentarians who failed to pass his expenses as “Tribunes of the people, whose mouths could not be stopped.”3 As a servant of the king, too, Shakespeare could not be seen to condone insurrection or rebellion. All of his instincts would in any case have been against it. He could draw attention to the plight of the poorer people without bread, while at the same time firmly withholding assent from their campaign of violence. That is what happens in Coriolanus.
There are other significant aspects to the play’s topicality. The first citizen launches a direct assault upon hoarding, and upon those who “Suffer vs to famish, and their Store-houses cramm’d with Graine”(76–77). It so happens that Shakespeare himself had already been noted for the storage of 80 bushels of malt at New Place, as we have seen, and there is no reason to doubt that he continued to store or hoard quantities of corn or malt. So through the irate voice of the first citizen he adverts to himself. It is a most extraordinary act of theatrical impersonality, suggesting very forcefully that his imagination was not violated by sentiment of any kind. He could even see himself without fellow feeling. When it is also noticed that some of the charges against the Midlands rioters are here replicated as charges against the nobleman, Coriolanus, then we realise that the events of the day have been displaced and reordered in an immense act of creative endeavour. Everything is changed. It is not a question of impartiality, or of refusing to take sides. It is a natural and instinctive process of the imagination. It is not a matter of determining where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie, weighing up the relative merits of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. It is a question of recognising that Shakespeare had no sympathies at all. There is no need to “take sides” when the characters are doing it for you.
Which is as much as to say that his sympathies, such as they were, lay entirely with the unfolding of the drama. It might even be suggested that the food riots at the beginning of the play (not present in the source, which merely describes the popular clamour of the Romans against usury) may simply have been Shakespeare’s way of arresting the attention of his audience. It was a way of allowing them access to the world of ancient Rome. It was a way of gaining their imaginative assent by presenting something topical and familiar. Certainly the theme of dearth disappears from the gathering drama. Once it had achieved its purpose, it was forgotten. It is an important token of Shakespeare’s true response to the world, which may well have been one of utter calmness and even of disinterest.
It has sometimes been surmised that he treats Coriolanus himself with a respect not untinged with admiration. He seems to be aware of his follies but forgives them for the sake of the character he presents to the audience. And that is the important point. The dramatist is intent upon presenting a character of power. Individual power is theatrical. Power misused and abused is also dramatic. Coriolanus is a thing of power; when he ceases to be that, he ceases to exist. That is the only reason Shakespeare chose him out of Plutarch. In a very interesting essay on Coriolanus William Hazlitt asserts that “the imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty … which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion.” Thus poetry puts “the one above the infinite many, might before right.”4 So the position of Coriolanus, reviled by the mass and exiled from Rome only to vow a terrible vengeance, is infinitely dramatic and elicits from Shakespeare some of his finest poetry.
CHAPTER 83. And Sorrow Ebs, Being Blown with Wind of Words
One of the most powerful figures in Coriolanus is the mother of the eponymous hero, Volumnia, who has sometimes been considered to be a portrait of Shakespeare’s own mother. One Danish critic, Georg Brandes, described Volumnia as the “sublime mother-form.”1 By curious coincidence Mary Arden died in the late summer of 1608, even as Coriolanus was being written, and on 9 September was buried in the parish church. She had outlived her husband and four of her children; whether the evident success of her oldest son compensated for the losses among her other children, is an open question. She had seen him rise to eminence in his dual profession as actor and writer, and purchase one of the grandest houses in the town. There is every reason to believe that she was proud of his achievements, and perhaps somewhat over-awed by them. We may recall here the admonitory words of Coriolanus to himself, that he must stand (2946—7)
As if a man were Author of himself,
And knew no other kin.
His mother had been occupying the old house in Henley Street together with Shakespeare’s sister, Joan Hart, who continued to live there after Shakespeare’s own death.
Shakespeare must have visited his mother there before her death. It has even been suggested that Coriolanus was written at Stratford because of the large supply of stage-directions in the published text. Thus there is written, “In this Mutinie, the Tribunes, the Aediles and the People are beat in” and “Martius followes them to gates, and is shut in.” The argument postulates that he did not intend to be present for any of the rehearsals of the first performances, and so had to be more than usually explicit in his directions for the actors. It is a possible circumstance.
Just before his mother’s death Shakespeare sued a Stratford neighbour, John Addenbrooke, for debt in the borough court; the sum of £6 was not forthcoming and so Shakespeare sued Addenbrooke’s “surety” for the money. The case continued for ten months, a clear sign of Shakespeare’s determination in such matters. In October he stood as godfather to the infant son of the alderman, Henry Walker, who was christened as William; he left the child a bequest in his will. It is important to note that Shakespeare could be accepted as a godfather only if he had outwardly conformed to the Church of England. There were clear rules on this matter, particularly since the godfather was charged with the spiritual education of the child. No nonconformist or recusant would have been permitted in that role. Before the ceremony, Shakespeare would also have received holy communion as a token of his orthodox faith. As the child of a recusant household, attached to the old faith but conforming to the observances of the new, he would have grown up with a profound sense of doubt. That is why ambiguity became one of the informing principles of his art. And why should it not be a mark of his behaviour in the world?