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M Y RON S I L B E R S TE I N
University of Chicago
For the past four decades, Coriolanus has been interpreted as a play
about language, but with curiously contradictory results. Coriolanus
has a natural antipathy to eloquence, claims one critic; he is emphatically no orator. Lacking the verbal resources and the condence
in language required for effective argument, he remains taciturn whenever possible, adds another, while a third terms him the only central character in Shakespeare who is an inadequate speaker. 1 In an
inuential essay arguing that for Coriolanus the circulation of language is an expression of cannibalism, Stanley Cavell likewise nds
the words of this particular play . . . uncharacteristically ineloquent
and claims that insofar as Coriolanus cant express desire he cannot
speak at all. 2 Coriolanus is antirhetoric, echoes one critic. 3 His
bodiliness is utterly unrelated to Volumnias life of speech, another
agrees. 4 Reviewing such linguistic studies, one recent article concurs
307
308
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Controversial Eloquence
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14. Parker, ed., Coriolanus. The play is cited parenthetically in the text from this edition by act, scene, and line numbers.
15. Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 125. Stephen Coote, Coriolanus (London: Penguin,
1992), 17, takes a similar tack on this scene, claiming that Menenius manipulative
cynicism has failed.
Controversial Eloquence
311
312
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Unlike Leontes passionate and nearly incoherent rants, such vituperation scarcely seems illogical but, as Joyce Van Dyke observes, is sedulously governed throughout by parallelism and relentless antitheses,
the dominant rhetorical gure of the play. 20 Is Martius incapable of
communicating with his plebeian audience? Or is he simply uninterested in doing so, insofar as his words really presuppose an imaginary
audience of senators? The opening scene leaves the question open.
That Martius does not share Meneniuss goal of persuasion in this
scene does not mean that he cannot be persuasive when he chooses.
Indeed, Shakespeare promptly drives this fact home in the battleeld scenes at Corioles. When the Romans at rst are beaten back to
their trenches, Enter . . . Martius cursing, in the best top-sergeant tradition. Yet his blistering denunciations stir no one to follow him when
he enters the gates alone and is shut in. (Interestingly, Plutarch does
credit Martius with inspiring a few men to follow him.) After personally standing off the city and bringing about its capture, he then rushes
to the other sector of the battleeld where Cominius is engaged and
begs to be deployed against Audius in three short speeches that are
all too commonly neglected in interpretations of the play:
I do beseech you
By all the battles wherein we have fought,
By th blood we have shed together,
By th vows we have made
To endure friends, that you directly set me
Against Audius and his Antiates,
And that you not delay the present, but,
Filling the air with swords advanced and darts,
We prove this very hour.
(1.6.5563)
Controversial Eloquence
313
sion when he chooses. His curses are the obverse of prayers, and
throughout the play he often expresses desire by praying; indeed, as
Lars Engle remarks, Prayer for Coriolanus has a proto-Protestant
privacy. 21 Although the context of this speech is one of haste and
military urgency, the hero is willing enough to delay the present to
couch his request in the form of a mildly convoluted periodic utterance, where the burden of his request is articially postponed until
the fth line of his speech. Coriolanus beseeches Cominius by introducing his request with a formally structured tricolon, for like Menenius he has been schooled in the value of rhetorical retardation.
Of course, the preference for syntactic triads is a hallmark of rhetorical discourse, familiar to us from such passages as Lincolns Gettysburg appeal for government of the people, by the people, for the
people. Like their classical predecessors, Renaissance rhetoricians
were fully aware that triadic amplication was central to oratory. The
practice of it will bring you to abundance of phrases, without which
you shall never have choice, the mother of perfection, John Hoskins
assured would-be orators in his Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1599).
Cicero in his orations useth it oft. Some others follow it to four
clauses, but he seldom exceedeth three. 22 In this key speech and
others, the heros use of the tricolon is charged with symbolic significance, for it demonstrates his ability and willingness to employ
the forms of oratorical discourse in communicating with his fellow
Romans.
Against Cominiuss judgment, Martius persuades him to grant the
request for troops. Take your choice of those / That best can aid your
action, the general assents. Martius then turns to the troops:
Those are they
That most are willing. If any such be here
As it were sin to doubtthat love this painting
Wherein you see me smeard; if any fear
Lesser his person than an ill report;
If any think brave death outweighs bad life,
And that his countrys dearer than himself,
Let him alone, or so many so minded,
Wave thus to express his disposition,
And follow Martius.
21. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 177.
22. John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton University Press, 1935), 25. In his periodic utterances, Coriolanus exemplies the dominant tendencies of Shakespeares style as a whole; see Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the
Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 46 48.
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[He waves his sword.] They all shout and wave their swords, take him
up in their arms and cast up their caps.
O, me alone! Make you a sword of me?
If these shows be not outward, which of you
But is four Volsces? None of you but is
Able to bear against the great Audius
A shield as hard as his. A certain number
Though thanks to allmust I select from all.
The rest shall bear the business in some other ght
As cause will be obeyed. Please you to march,
And I shall quickly draw out my command,
Which men are best inclind.
(1.6.6786)
His charisma wins not only admiration but service, is the comment
of one critic on this scene. 23 But it is less his personal charisma than
his rhetorical power that wins the troops, for if Roman idiom describes ghting as an armys form of speech, it also reveres speech as
a mode of ghting; indeed, eloquence and armies are almost synonymous, for in the Latin plural the rhetorical virtue of copia denotes
troops, copiae. 24 Here Coriolanus addresses the commoners again in
the copious language of oratory. The chief index of his formal eloquence is the periodic tricolon composed of three if clauses that introduces his appeal for volunteers. Whereas his cursing before the
gates of Corioles was ineffective, this rhetorical appeal generates more
followers than he can use, moving them to eager emulation of the
heros derring-do in single combat. The contrast is dramatic. Rhetoric
is here linked with moral generosityAs it were sin to doubtand
even with politeness that is rather startling in a military contextPlease
you to march. Note especially the elaborately foresighted courtesy of
A certain number / Though thanks to allmust I select, with which
Martius thoughtfully envisions the possibility that the selection process may hurt some feelings and seeks to prevent his necessary choice
from being interpreted as an insult to anyone.
The lesson of this passage could hardly be more pointed. Shakespeares Martius does not lack the eloquent tongue that Plutarch gives
him. When he speaks with rhetorical calculation and appeals to the
people generously, they respond to such an appeal with generosity of
23. Thomas Clayton, So our virtues lie in thinterpretation of the time: Shakespeares Tragic Coriolanus and Coriolanus, and Some Questions of Value, Ben Jonson
Journal 1 (1994): 162.
24. See 1.4.4 and Philip Brockbank, ed., Coriolanus (London: Methuen, 1976), 1.4.4;
also Rhodes, Power, 48.
Controversial Eloquence
315
their own. Indeed, Shakespeare invents this entire episode (for which
there is little precedent in Plutarch) specically to dramatize Martiuss
oratorical power to persuade the people to unanimous consent if he
chooses. The closest Plutarch comes is another scene where Martius
taking his friends and followers with him and such as he could by
fayer wordes intreate to goe with him, dyd ronne certen forreyes into
the dominion of the Antiates. 25
As one study has argued, It is possible to simulate the oratorical
period by constructing sentences where one or two group beta clauses
are attached to the initial constituents of the main clause in order to
offset the weight of several beta clauses attached to the nal constituents of the main clause. These left-branching sentences produce the
effect of roundness even when the number and the position of the
constituents are not so perfectly balanced around a centrally located
main clause. Such left-branching sentences are notably more numerous in Antony and Cleopatra than in Richard II, and the increase seems
to be associated with Shakespeares attempts to imitate the round
structure of the oratorical period and thus to create a Roman style. 26
Anne Barton likewise contrasts Coriolanus to Richard II, arguing
that whereas Richard is the lonely champion of words, the later play
presents a Roman world of rhetoric and persuasion in which the
hero alone resists the value placed on verbal formulations. 27 As the
play progresses, it is easy enough to nd instances of Coriolanuss
distrust of language. But it is also easy to isolate them from other elements in his character and thus distort them. Coriolanus consistently
admires speech that is validated by action. But this may not presuppose
a rigid antithesis between them, for the need for appropriate action
was a Roman rhetorical commonplace echoed throughout Renaissance
handbooks like Thomas Wilsons: Tullie saith well. The gesture of
man is the speache of his bodie. 28 As Volumnia says, Action is eloquence (3.2.78), and her son is on occasion quite capable of believing the converse. He resents attery because it seems to subordinate
25. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 5:517. Among the few to note the signicance of this scene is M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeares Roman Plays and Their Background (1910; reprint, New York: Russell, 1967), 528; his painstaking account of how
Shakespeare rendered the Roman social background is too commonly neglected in
interpretations of the play.
26. Dolores M. Burton, Shakespeares Grammatical Style: A Computer-Assisted Analysis
of Richard II and Antony and Cleopatra (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 53.
27. Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Limits of Language, Shakespeare Survey 24
(1971): 27.
28. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, FL:
Scholars Facsimiles, 1962), 248.
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deeds to words and scorns the voices of the people because the language of the mob is by denition mobile, unstable, changeable. But if
their words mutate alarmingly, he wants to believe that his own need
not. When they revoke their ckle consent to his consulship, he vehemently resists his fellow senators, who argue, No more words, we beseech you, in an effort to shush his anger:
How, no more?
As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay, against those measles
Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought
The very way to catch them.
(3.1.7883)
Controversial Eloquence
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318
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34. See G. Thomas Tanselle and Florence W. Dunbar, Legal Language in Coriolanus,
Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 23138.
35. Philip Brockbanks judicious gloss on this passage (200) has obviously been misunderstood by Bryan Reynolds when he perversely argues that here Cominius is agreeing with Sicinius rather than with Coriolanus, in What Is the City But the People?:
Transversal Performance and Radical Politics, in his Performing Transversally: Reimagining
Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 100101.
Controversial Eloquence
319
whom his standing is assured. To solicit their favor would be unnecessary and even faintly insulting, denying their intimacy. He can begin
his seventy lines of impassioned argument with no more exordium
than to say, O good but most unwise patricians, why, / You grave but
reckless senators, have you thus / Given Hydra here to choose an
ofcer (3.1.9395). Menenius, too, is capable of such uncomplimentary straightforwardness, but in addressing the plebeians in the opening scene he reserves his criticisms until a tactful exordium and the
lengthy fable of the belly have put him in a position to squelch the
ringleader with an eminently aristocratic insult.
When Brutus interrupts the critique of popular government to
ask, Why should the people give / One that speaks thus their voice?
Coriolanuss response is characteristic: Ill give my reasons / More
worthier than their voices (3.1.12022). Shunning rhetorical ornamentation, his speech is essentially impassioned reasoning. There are few
metaphors and little obvious poetry; the speaker oscillates between
crisply concrete diction and the abstract terminology of moral and
political analysis. But the result is scarcely the lifeless scholastic formality of Brutuss funeral oration in Julius Caesar. 36 The orator is carried
forward by the logic of his argument, reinforced by syntactic parallelism and almost invariable enjambment. Punctuated by imperatives
and self-answered questions, the speech is urgent and powerful. Surveying all Shakespeares formal orations, Kennedy characterizes it as
follows: Impassioned as the speech becomes because of the earnestness and decision of the orator, the speaker never loses sight of the
fact that his purpose is to make an intellectual, not an emotional
appeal. Under analysis, therefore, the speech reveals articulate organic
structure; but so spontaneous and sincere and convincing is the rhetoric of the orator that the inner mechanics of the structure and the
functioning of the parts of speech never obtrude to detract from the
artistic effect of the oration as a whole. The speech fails to achieve its
purpose, but its failure is a glorious failure from the standpoint of
rhetorical art. 37
Its most evidently artful section is the peroration, where Coriolanus
concludes his argument with a periodic tricolon climaxing in a lengthy
36. On Brutuss rhetoric, see esp. Maria Wickert, Antikes Gedankengut in Coriolanus,
Shakespeare Jahrbuch 82/83 (1948): 1124.
37. Kennedy, Oration, 108. By contrast, Houstons rhetorical analysis of this speech
(Shakespearean Sentences, 172) overstresses its supposedly passionate derangements of
normal language, while in its logical rigor it seems a cardinal exception to Paul A.
Cantors view in Shakespeares Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1976), 11316, that Coriolanuss Roman rhetoric is primarily the art of conveying preconceived truths rather than discovering truth.
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Controversial Eloquence
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322
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that powers his initial invective underlies almost all his speeches, even
the most persuasive. In him aristocratic brusqueness seems a constant
verbal assault on shams fancied and real. The anger that drives an epic
hero like Achilles also drives Coriolanus to epic feats in a military
world where an army may speak by giving battle: They lie in view,
but have not spoke as yet (1.4.4). But his angers monotonous expression in words becomes almost as wearisome in this play as Achilles
single-minded wrath on the battleeld of Troy. In Aristotelian terms,
the heroic ethos to which Coriolanus insistently addresses himself is
excessively narrow; he lacks Homers and Aristotles awareness of
Achilles shield. It colors even his masculine predilection for reasoned
discourse as opposed to amboyant and potentially effeminate emotionalism, for the ratio in oratio. Whereas rhetorical argument tends
to deal in probabilities, Coriolanus aspires to absolute certainty. In The
Blazon of Gentrie (1586), John Ferne could prefer the blandishments
of rhetoric to logics rigor because Logicke will with violence extort
its rational conclusions. 41 Likewise, in Ciceros De oratore logic is compared to a closed st whereas rhetoric gures as an invitingly open
hand. 42 In the De copia, Erasmus was only one of several Renaissance
rhetoricians who echoed Quintillians specic example in recommending a Ciceronian approach to amplifying a bare idea invitingly with
graphic and emotive evidentia: If someone should say that a city was
captured, he doubtless comprehends in that general statement everything that attends such fortune, but if you develop what is implicit in
the one word, ames will appear pouring through houses and temples;
the crash of falling buildings will be heard . . . there will be the wailing
of infants and women, old people cruelly preserved by fate till that
day . . . and the mother struggling to keep her infant. 43 But whereas,
like a good Ciceronian, Volumnia counters her sons abstract notion
of a new name forged by burning Rome with copious, openhanded
exemplication of the consequences, Coriolanus, habituated to a rhetoric of colder reasons (5.3.287), could only rebut her in terms akin
to striking her with his st. In his austere intellectual devotion to a
41. John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (1586; reprinted in Proquest: Early English Books
Online), 45. On the traditional equation between highly ornamental rhetoric and effeminacy, see Christy Dermet, Speaking Sensibly: Feminine Rhetoric in Measure for Measure and Alls Well That Ends Well, Renaissance Papers 1986, ed. Dale B. J. Randall and
Joseph A. Porter (Columbia, SC: Southeast Renaissance Conference, 1986), 4351.
42. The trope can be traced back to Varro and was echoed by Cassiodorus among
later rhetoricians; see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 450.
43. Quoted in Trousdale, Shakespeare, 4748; John Hoskins, Directions, 2223, likewise
borrows the same rhetorical exemplum of a captured city from Quintillian 8.3.6769.
Controversial Eloquence
323
Coriolanus speaks with the faint contempt for rhetorical ornamentation of a Roman of the old school like Catulus. Elizabethan spaniels
44. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge University Press, 1904), 265.
45. Parker, ed., Coriolanus, Introduction, 46.
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attered their tails when fawning, as Brockbank notes; the folio reading attered might be retained as an intentional ambiguity permitted
by the older conation of utter-atter (308). The Roman who would
not atter Neptune for his trident (3.1.258) seemed to the frustrated
Audius to have watered his new plants with dews of attery, / Seducing so my friends; and to this end / He bowed his nature, never
known before / But to be rough, unswayable and free (5.6.2225).
Grounded only in the Volscian leaders embittered carping, this claim
may not be reliable. But whether or not Coriolanus attered his enemies in both senses of the word, in our last sight of him he certainly
atters himself, proudly reasserting the title that he once affected to
scorn.
Though his vision of truth is austere, it remains at bottom verbal.
Stung by a word, this man is not boy enough to say, Sticks and stones
may break my bones / But names can never hurt me, nor should the
response of an African-American to the same insult suggest that this
reaction is necessarily immature. 46 His eloquent self-laudation provokes the Antiates to a violence that he almost welcomes. But let it
come, he had decided when determining not to remain in Rome with
his family after concluding peace (5.3.189). Like the later Roman hero
Regulus, celebrated for honoring his word to his enemies by returning voluntarily to certain torture and execution in Carthage, Coriolanuss return to Antium is an act paradoxically imbued with the
ethos of his native city. Scarcely considering his Volscian audience as
political beings, he stands in his imagination before the bar of history
and seeks to vindicate himself with Roman forthrightness. Unlike
Achilles insulted by Agamemnon, his last words are those of a man
restraining himself with difculty but wistfully determined to die a
martyr to the law: O that I had him, / With six Audiuses, or more,
his tribe, / To use my lawful sword. 47
Plutarchs solitariness may well tinge this speech. But since, like
King James, before whom the play may initially have been performed
at Blackfriars, Shakespeare sees less civic virtue in Rome than does
Plutarch, his heros social isolation is that much less a vice. 48 Likewise,
46. In Lesbian and Gay Taxonomies, Critical Inquiry 29 (2002): 132, Alan Sineld
likewise situates Audiuss insult within the demeaning practice of calling ethnic others
boy to deny their manly equivalence.
47. See Brower, Hero, 35960, on 3.6.12729; see further, 35481, for an astute
treatment of the mingling of Homeric and Roman ideals in the play.
48. See Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the Kings Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court,
160313 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 148; also cf. Parker, ed., Coriolanus, Introduction, 8687.
Controversial Eloquence
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326
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Controversial Eloquence
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328
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65. Heinrich F. Plett, Shakespeare and the Ars Rhetorica, in Rhetoric and Pedagogy,
ed. Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995), 255, 258.
66. Arthur Riss, The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language, ELH 59
(1992): 71. For a similar point, see Plotz, Coriolanus, 80914.
67. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 191.
68. Parker, ed., Coriolanus, Introduction, 110.
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Controversial Eloquence
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however, Sanders and Jacobsons forceful rebuttal of such thinking, Shakespeares Magnanimity, 153: Coriolanuss silenceshis moments of steadfastly not soliloquizingmay
be lled with something just as important as Hamlets loose-souled lucubrations. There
are other forms of moral intelligence besides the sort that is perpetually proclaiming itself. Some of them are rather attractive.
72. Kernan, Shakespeare, 144. For other cogent defenses of Coriolanuss tragic stature, see Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 191; Cantor, Shakespeares Rome, 99124; and
Sanders and Jacobson, Shakespeares Magnanimity, 186.