Coriolanus and the Roman World of Contradiction: A Paradoxical World Elsewhere

Abstract

This study argues that Shakespeare's aim in Coriolanus is twofold: (1) to depict the ancient world of Rome as dominated by contradiction; and (2) to signal to us moderns, in the biblical tradition, that we can comprehend or, in other words, interpret the contradictory world of the ancients solely on the basis of a paradoxical world elsewhere, beyond contradiction. Shakespeare thus shows us how important it is to distinguish between the contradictory values of antiquity, from which the Romans (like the Greeks) know no exit, and the paradoxical values of modernity, whose interpretive basis, the love of neighbor—interpret others as you would have others interpret you—provides us moderns with a world of otherness (Augustine's City of God) by which we can overcome the earthly contradictions dividing us.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), I.16.

2. Not to mention Titus Andronicus or Timon of Athens. I discuss Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida, together with The Rape of Lucrece, in my book Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will (forthcoming). All citations from Coriolanus and other Shakespeare's plays are from The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

3. When the other tribune then observes that Martius is “a lamb indeed that baas like a bear,” Menenius responds that “He's a bear indeed that lives like a lamb” (2.1.10–11).

4. Spinoza, Ethics, IV.35, Corollary 2, Scholium 2 (Opera, Vol. II, ed. Carl Gebhardt [Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuchhandlung, 1925]).

5. While Stanley Cavell, in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), is extremely perceptive in his reading of Coriolanus—he sees that its hero is caught in the total contradiction that to be himself he is dependent on the plebians, on Rome, that is, in order to be himself he must be silent and yet cannot forgo speech—he does not recognize that the play contains within itself no position from which it can be interpreted. J. L. Simmons in Shakespeare's Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1973) has real insight into the fundamental differences between the worlds depicted by Shakespeare in his Roman plays and in his major tragedies (Hamlet, Lear, etc.). In entitling his introductory, first chapter “A World Elsewhere,” he recognizes that “neither side [e.g. in Coriolanus the patricians and the plebeians] offers an absolute that can establish our moral perspective” (3). Still, while seeing that there is no world beyond Rome for Coriolanus (or for Brutus or Antony), he is less clear about what it is that we readers are to find in the Roman plays, given his elision of the concepts of contradiction and paradox. In my judgment, Barbara L. Parker in Plato's Republic and Shakespeare's Rome: A Political Study of the Roman Works (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2004) does not succeed in showing that it is fruitful to place the Roman plays in the context of Plato's political thought while ignoring the fundamental difference between pagan and biblical values that Shakespeare makes in them. In indicating how important it is to view the Roman plays in their historico-political settings (i.e. in showing that their settings are not secondary or aesthetically unimportant), Paul A. Cantor, in Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), argues that Shakespeare's portrayal of Rome in these plays is historically and politically accurate. But this is also where his vision falters. He does not ask what Shakespeare sees (or shows us) in these Roman plays or what the basis is for his insight into the “tragedy” of Rome. While Robert S. Miola, in Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), understands that the values central to ancient Rome—shame, honor, and fame—lead to the destruction of both the state (society) and its heroes (i.e. they are contradictory), he fails to develop a hermeneutic whereby he can distinguish between what we see in Shakespeare's Roman works and what we are to think about them (i.e. how we are to respond to them adequately). It is regrettable that the difference between pagan and Christian values in Shakespeare's Roman plays is not addressed in the big collection of articles edited by Roy Battenhouse (Shakespeare's Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994]). The effort on the part of Bernard Williams, in Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), to provide a corrective to modern thought, to the degree, apparently, that it is Kantian (and Christian), on the basis of liberating ancient, ethical thought, especially as found in Homer and the tragedians, from “progressivist” readings, is sharply limited by the absence in his study of any consideration of Shakespeare's plays. Consequently, because Williams does not take into account the importance of modern (biblical) values in the plays of Shakespeare, he cannot address either the critique of ancient (pagan) values in the Roman and Greek plays or the fundamental difference between Shakespearean tragedy (Hamlet, King Lear, etc.) and ancient Greek tragedy. It would also appear that his overall lack of serious treatment of biblical values is reflected in his limited conception of “Kantian” philosophy.

6. The decisive difference between the critique of Christianity as found in Machiavelli and in Nietzsche can be seen in the following quotations from their works. Machiavelli writes that “our [Christian] religion, having taught us the truth and the true way of life, leads us to ascribe less esteem to worldly honour … Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action” (The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974], II.2). Nietzsche, however, recognizes in On the Genealogy of Morals that it was precisely the moral (and political) commitment to “the truth” and to “the true way of life” on the part of Jews and Christians that empowered them to defeat Rome. He points out that the No of the ressentiment of the slave morality of decadence, which he associates with the ancient Jews and their Christian heirs, unlike the noble morality of the ancient Romans, “becomes creative and gives birth to values. … [T]his No is its creative deed” (I.10). He states in his no-holds barred attack on Christianity in The Anti-Christ (in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: The Viking Press, 1954]): “The Jews are the strangest people in world history because, confronted with the question whether to be or not to be, they chose, with a perfectly uncanny deliberateness, to be at any price: this price was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, of the whole inner world as well as the outer. … Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily and out of the most profound prudence of self-preservation, take sides with all the instincts of decadence—not as mastered by them, but because they divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against ‘the world.’ The Jews are the antithesis of all decadents: … they have known how to place themselves at the head of all the movements of decadence (as the Christianity of Paul), in order to create something out of them which is stronger than any Yes-saying party of life” (#24).

7. The editor of the Norton text suggests alternative readings for both sets of lines. While the first set can mean either that Coriolanus’ “merit is so great that it overwhelms the recital of his faults” or that “his merit is of a kind that impedes attempts to praise it,” the second set of lines can be read to mean either that “power requires reputation” or that “reputation threatens power” (2856).

8. “Falter” is the usual emendation of “fouler” as found in the First Folio of 1623, the sole text of Coriolanus. In his edition of the play (Penguin, 1967) G. R. Hibbard emends “fouler” to “fuller.” His notes on lines 48–55 are instructive (243–44).

9. See Politics III.4 where Aristotle discusses “Whether the excellence (arete) of a good man and a good citizen is the same or not” (The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], vol. 2). He points out that, since citizens have different functions within a given state, “the excellence of the citizen must therefore be relative to the constitution [i.e. the state] of which he is a member. If, then, there are many forms of government, it is evident that there is not one single excellence of the good citizen which is perfect excellence. But we say that the good man is he who has one single excellence which is perfect excellence. Hence it is evident that the good citizen need not of necessity possess the excellence which makes a good man.” (In other words, the excellence of the good man, because it is not relative to a particular constitution or state, cannot be found in the polis.) Aristotle explains further that, since “all the citizens cannot be alike, the excellence of the citizen and of the good man cannot coincide. All [citizens] must have the excellence of the good citizen—thus, and thus only, can the state be perfect; but they will not have the excellence of a good man, unless we assume [which Aristotle does not assume] that in the good state all the citizens must be good.” Aristotle goes on to observe that, since the state, like any living being, is “composed of unlikes” (e.g. soul and body, reason and appetite, husband and wife, and master and slave), “therefore the excellence of all the citizens cannot possibly be the same. … I have said enough to show why the two kinds of excellence [i.e. those of the good citizen and of the good man] cannot be absolutely the same.”

10. Kierkegaard, citing Phaedrus 229e, observes in Philosophical Fragments (trans. H. V. and E. H. Hong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985]) that Socrates does not know whether he is a monster or a god (37).

11. Kierkegaard shows in Philosophical Fragments that, because Greek skepticism is based on what he calls immediate sensation and immediate cognition, it “cannot deceive.” Although the ancient skeptics do not deny the correctness of either (external) sensation or (internal) cognition (logic), they do not draw any conclusions, i.e. they suspend their judgment. Deception, in contrast, belongs to the dialectic of faith and doubt. Faith (belief) is not knowledge but a resolution, “an act of freedom, an expression of will.” It equally follows, then, that “doubt can be terminated only in freedom, by an act of will” (Op. cit., 82–83). Montaigne also points out in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965]) that the ancient Pyrrhonists used “their reason to inquire and debate, but not to conclude and choose,” with the result that their claim that what seems true also seems false ends in “suspension of judgment” and “a perpetual confession of ignorance.” He writes further that, consequently, we can understand “why the Pyrrhonian philosophers cannot express their general conception [of life] in any manner of speaking; for they would need a new language. Ours [i.e. our new language] is wholly formed of affirmative propositions, which to them are utterly repugnant; so that when they say ‘I doubt,’ immediately you have them by the throat to make them admit that at least they know and are sure of this fact, that they doubt” (374, 392). Montaigne's observation that our language “is wholly formed of affirmative propositions” (which, in indicating that even our negatively expressed statements are ultimately affirmations, reveals itself to be an ontological and not simply a grammatical claim) is, in being applicable to modern and not to ancient thinkers, consistent with Descartes. For what Descartes shows us, in demonstrating the “necessary” (i.e. the free) relationship between thought and existence, is that his methodology of doubt results in affirmation (the demonstration of assent). In contrast, it is the very opposition between thought (what is knowable in itself) and existence (what is knowable through others) that sets apart the suspended world of ancient contradiction from our modern world of “affirmative propositions.”

12. Kierkegaard writes in The Concept of Irony—with Continual Reference to Socrates (trans. H. V. and E. H. Hong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989]) that “Shakespeare has frequently been eulogized as the grand master of irony, and there can be no doubt that there is justification for that. But by no means does Shakespeare allow the substantive worth [of his works] to evaporate into an ever more fugitive sublimate. … When Shakespeare is related ironically to what he writes, it is precisely in order to let the objective dominate. … Therefore, irony is not present at some particular point of the poem but is omnipresent in it, so that the irony visible in the poem is in turn ironically controlled. Therefore irony simultaneously makes the poem and the poet free. But in order for this to happen, the poet himself must be master over the irony” (324).

13. Hibbard, in his summary of 4.7 (in which Aufidius indicates to his lieutenant that the victory of Coriolanus over Rome will be his downfall: “One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail”), states that the scene both explains “the reasons for Aufidius's turning against Coriolanus” and allows Shakespeare “to sum up his hero's character … and to give a number of possible interpretations of his earlier behaviour, and especially of his failure in the central movement of the action” (Op. cit., 241). But it is precisely the concept of character to which failure (sin) can be ascribed that I argue cannot be found either in the play or in its Roman “hero.” Coriolanus’ “failure” is not like that of Richard II, Othello, or Lear, etc. But it is like that of Brutus and Antony (and ultimately Octavius Caesar). Also see the study of John Roe, “‘Character’ in Plutarch and Shakespeare: Brutus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony,” in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).