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ABSTRACT
Quentin Skinner argues that a number of Shakespeare’s plays depict characters making use of the rhetorical figure paradiastole (the moral redescription of actions), and that in the majority of cases a speaker’s use of it is exposed and condemned. The exception is Coriolanus, which uniquely leaves the figure unexposed and the questions it raises unresolved. This article engages with Skinner’s argument by suggesting (1) that Coriolanus is perhaps not unique in this respect; (2) that the play’s treatment of paradiastole is even more profound than Skinner suggests, and (3) that in Coriolanus paradiastole is presented as the epitome of persuasive speech more generally, which is in turn exposed as inevitably generating an irresolvable pattern of arguments back and forth.
Acknowledgements
My greatest thanks are due to Quentin Skinner, for inviting me to speak at the colloquium where these ideas were first tried out, as well as for his unstinting generosity and support over many years. I am very grateful to my fellow contributors, to members of the audience for their helpful questions, and to Katrin Ettenhuber for reading a number of draft versions. Special thanks also to Andrea Brady, Vanessa Lim, and Hannah Whitfield.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Skinner, “Rhetorical Redescription and Its Uses in Shakespeare.” See further Skinner, “Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence”; Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes; “Paradiastole: Redescribing the Vices as Virtues.”
2 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, X3v, quoted in Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 89. My emphases.
3 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.3.6; quoted in Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 91.
4 A helpful anthology of such criticisms, and their opposites, is Rebhorn, ed., Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric. Note that several of the invectives against rhetoric (e.g. by Agrippa and John Jewel) were themselves set-pieces designed to display the author’s rhetorical prowess.
5 For a survey of these misgivings, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 176–80.
6 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 172.
7 Ibid., 341.
8 Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 106–8.
9 Ibid., 117.
10 Weever, The Mirror of Martyrs, A3v. See further Colclough, “Talking to the Animals.”
11 See Norbrook, “Rehearsing the Plebeians.”
12 Norbrook, “Rehearsing the Plebeians,” 193; 211. On the play’s application to the present, see Peter Holland’s excellent introduction to the Arden third series edition: Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland. All quotations from Coriolanus are from this edition, with act, scene, and line numbers supplied parenthetically in the text. See also Shrank, “Civility and the City in Coriolanus,” 406.
13 On Brecht, see Coriolanus, ed. Holland, 120–9; Norbrook, “Rehearsing the Plebeians,” 182–4. On Bannon, see Pollack-Pelzner, “Behold, Steve Bannon’s Hip-Hop Shakespeare Rewrite: ‘Coriolanus’.” On Coriolanus and Trump, see Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, 155–82, at 178. I refer to the protagonist as ‘Martius’ rather than ‘Coriolanus’.
14 On the former, see especially Zeeveld, “Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics”; Coriolanus, ed. Holland, 56–71.
15 Plutarch, “The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus,” in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Compared, V5r, Y4r (see Shrank, “Civility and the City,” 409, for the source of this apparent contradiction in North’s use of Jacques Amyot’s French translation of Plutarch); see also X6r, where Martius’ speech to the Volsces shows him to be ‘no lesse eloquent in tongue, then warlike in showe’.
16 See, e.g., Calderwood, “Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words”; Sicherman, “Coriolanus: The Failure of Words”; ch. 9 (and, for a riposte, Plotz, “Coriolanus and the Failure of Performatives”).
17 See, e.g., Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton.
18 Shrank, “Civility and the City in Coriolanus,” 423.
19 Peltonen, “Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus”; West and Silberstein, “The Controversial Eloquence of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus – an Anti-Ciceronian Orator?.”
20 Plutarch, “The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus,” in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Compared, X2r.
21 On the confused location of Coriolanus’ death, see Holland’s note to the opening of 5.6.
22 On the lion and the fox, see Machiavelli, The Prince, 61; on Machiavelli’s deliberate and satirical undermining here of Cicero’s advice in De officiis, 1.13.41, see Skinner, “Republican virtues in an age of princes,” 145.
23 Norbrook, “Rehearsing the Plebeians,” 205.
24 An interpretation confirmed by Cominius, who describes it as ‘from the canon’ (3.1.91), i.e., out of order or unconstitutional, as Holland glosses it.
25 See Norbrook, “Rehearsing the Plebeians,” 202 on Martius’ fear of Greek-style democracy.
26 Norbrook, “Rehearsing the Plebeians,” 185–6; 208.
27 Plutarch, “How a Man may Discern a Flatterer from a Friend,” in The Philosophie, commonlie called the Morals, H5r; quoted in Skinner, “Rhetorical Redescription and Its Uses in Shakespeare,” 95. Cf. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 173, where he quotes Richard Beacon, Solon his Follie (London, 1594) on the links between paradiastole and the reformation of government.
28 Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Compared, H5v-H6r.
29 See especially Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 341–2. Note that, as Skinner explains, Hobbes goes on to argue, first, that in civil associations the arbiter should be the figure of the sovereign, and, secondly, that this arbitration need not be arbitrary in the pejorative sense. Rather, it can be based on a scientific foundation, whereby the name of a virtue can be applied to any action which conduces to peace, and to a sociable and comfortable life (rather than to one which, as a traditional argument would have it, exhibits a mediocrity of passions).
30 On Bodin and Shakespeare’s play, see Muir, “The Background of Coriolanus”; see also Coriolanus, ed. Holland, 104. On Bodin and rhetoric, see Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric, 128–31.
31 Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 2Z1v–2Z2r.
32 Ibid., 2Z2r.
33 Ibid.
34 Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 2Z2v.
35 Bodin returns to his praise of Menenius’ pacifying eloquence a couple of pages later: The Six Books of a Common-weale, 2Z3v.
36 Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 3A2r.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.; cf. Cicero, De oratore, 3.14.55.
41 Hobbes, Leviathan, 111. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 341.
42 Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 116–17.