The Controversial Eloquence of Shakespeares Coriolanusan AntiCiceronian Orator?

Author(s): MichaelWest and MyronSilberstein

Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 102, No. 3 (February 2005), pp. 307-331
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Controversial Eloquence of Shakespeares

Coriolanusan Anti-Ciceronian Orator?
MICHAEL WEST

University of Pittsburgh
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

1. Maurice Charney, Shakespeares Roman Plays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1963), 3435; James L. Calderwood, Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words, in Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. James L. Calderwood and Harold
E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 551; John Porter Houston,
Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 163. For similar pronouncements, see Carol Sicherman, Coriolanus:
The Failure of Words, ELH 39 (1972): 191, 199; Leonard Tennenhouse, Coriolanus:
History and Crisis of the Semantic Order, Comparative Drama 10 (1977): 334; Lawrence
Danson, Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeares Drama of Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 142.
2. Stanley Cavell, Who does the wolf love? Reading Coriolanus, Representations 1
(1983): 12, 17, 6.
3. Bruce Krajewski, Traveling with Hermes: Hermeneutics and Rhetoric (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 52.
4. Jarrett Walker, Voiceless Bodies and Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human Perception in Coriolanus, Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 182.
2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2005/10203-0001$10.00

307

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that Coriolanus seems deeply suspicious of language, while another

describes him as the least intellectual of Shakespeares major tragic
protagonists. 5 Underpinning much criticism in this vein is the assumption that Caius Martiuss supposed inarticulateness stamps him as a
sort of Roman Rambo, so that the play is Shakespeares last and most
emphatic denunciation of heroic values. 6
When combined with the political issues preoccupying scholars who
now pay increased attention to the agricultural riots that gured importantly in the plays Jacobean context, this conception of the hero
makes, at least, for eloquent critical sermonizing. But was it Shakespeares conception? It was certainly not that of Plutarch, who structured the heros speeches around the gures of Roman rhetoric, for
in Sir Thomas Norths translation Coriolanus is specically described
as having an eloquent tongue. 7 If Shakespeare altered Plutarchs
hero in this respect, the change escaped the sharp eye of A. C. Bradley, who judged that he is very eloquent. 8 With some reluctance,
another critic agreed that Coriolanus is not in fact decient in intelligence as he demonstrates in his clear-sighted and well-marshalled
address to the senators. 9 The point is buttressed by Milton Boone
Kennedys study of the oration in Shakespearean drama, still a standard work though it dates from the 1940s. Formal orations were most
frequent in the histories, Kennedy found, diminishing in the tragic
period, which furnishes only thirteen examples of the form. Five of
these occur in Coriolanus, more than in any other great tragedy, and
Kennedy judged that those of the hero were easily Shakespeares
nest examples of stage oratory: In the emotional rhetoric of Coriolanus Shakespeare seems to have risen to some of his best utter5. Burton Hatlen, The Noble Thing and the Boy of Tears: Coriolanus and the Embarrassments of Identity, English Literary Renaissance 27 (1997): 411; Maurice Hunt,
Violentst Complementarity: The Double Warriors of Coriolanus, Studies in English
Literature 31 (1991): 314. In What Hath a Quarter-Century of Coriolanus Criticism
Wrought? in The Shakespearean International Yearbook II: Where Are We Now in Shakespeare Studies? ed. W. R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002),
6869, Lee Bliss conrms that such opinions predominate among recent rhetorically
oriented critics of the play.
6. Citing previous studies by Victoria Kahn, Janet Adelman, Steven Marx, and
Madelon Sprengnether, in Manhood and Chevalrie: Coriolanus, Prince Henry, and
the Chivalric Revival, Review of English Studies 51 (2000): 422, Robin Headlam Wells
reaches this conclusion.
7. Sir Thomas North, trans., Coriolanus, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge, 1966), 5:543.
8. A. C. Bradley, Coriolanus: The British Academy Second Annual Shakespeare Lecture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1912), 5.
9. R. F. Hill, Coriolanus: Violentest Contrariety, Essays and Studies 17 (1964): 17.

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Michael West and Myron Silberstein

Controversial Eloquence

309

ance. 10 Thus one current article discerns in Coriolanus a capacity for

remarkable . . . incendiary rhetoric, while two recent editors of the
play praise his characteristically hard, brilliant, cutting eloquence as
providing a rhetorical equivalent of his conduct on the battleeld. 11
Indeed, it has been cogently argued that the heros peculiarity is not
an insensitivity to words; rather he is uncommonly sensitive to them. 12
Were he not, the play might be excruciating in the theater, for the
surprising fact is that this supposed verbal incompetent speaks volumes of words. Only two of Shakespeares tragic heroes have more
lines, and Coriolanuss role is one of the fattest in the entire canon.
The issue of language is indeed at the core of the drama, as Stanley
Fish has suggested in a stimulating essay applying speech-act theory
to the play; but as James Marlow noted, the results were rather shy
insofar as the hero emerged as an inarticulate isolato who can only
promise or curse with gusto, who abhors asking or praising, and
who scarcely ever communicates within his solipsistic universe of discourse. 13 Like Cavell, Fish seems reluctant to acknowledge the moral
and political shortcomings of the Roman society dramatized. We need
an interpretation of the play that can account for such radically divergent views of the heros rhetorical ability or lack of it. The thesis and
antithesis of prior criticism yield a plausible synthesis if contextualized
with more historical detail. Roman and Renaissance attitudes toward
rhetoric illuminate the behavior of Coriolanus at many points. He is
not the tongue-tied rhetorical ignoramus some of his detractors have
conjured up. True, this republican hero rarely expresses himself with
Ciceronian amplitude, but Ciceros was by no means the only form of
oratory admired in the Renaissance. An adequate reading of the play
should dene the kinds of eloquence that Coriolanus attempts while
conceding both his virtues and his limitations as a public speaker.
Before we proceed any further, hear me speak, proclaims the First
Citizen to his mutinous fellows as the play opens. Speak, speak, they
10. Milton Boone Kennedy, The Oration in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1942), 61.
11. Yvonne Bruce, The Pathology of Rhetoric in Coriolanus, Upstart Crow 20 (2000):
107; Jonathan Crewe, ed., Coriolanus (New York: Penguin, 1999), xxxv; R. B. Parker,
ed., The Tragedy of Coriolanus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 75.
12. Joyce Van Dyke, Making a Scene: Language and Gesture in Coriolanus, Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 135.
13. Stanley Fish, How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and
Literary Criticism, Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 9831025; James Marlow, Fish
Doing Things with Austin and Searle, Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 160312. For
further criticism of Fish and Cavell, see Gary Wihl, The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Deconstruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 119
37; John Plotz, Coriolanus and the Failure of Performatives, ELH 63 (1996): 80932.

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reply, cheerfully adjourning their rebellion for the nonce (1.1.13). 14

The plebeians are an eminently malleable lot, for a mob is by denition
mobile, and as the famous simile that greets schoolboys at the beginning of Virgils Aeneid suggests, Roman culture was built on reverence
for the skilled orator who can calm a riot with rhetorical prowess.
Rhetorical prowess is needed, to be sure, for, like that of the Midlands agricultural rioters, this mobs hunger is real, however groundless their notion that the rich take positive pleasure in seeing them
starve (1.1.1821). But whereas food is denitely not being distributed
to them by the patricians, Menenius seeks to assuage their hunger
with a parable of social harmony in which the patricians gure as a
generous belly supplying all the body politics members with gurative nourishment and left only with the bran. Refusing to believe that
empty bellies can be so easily satised with allegorical food, a few critics like Annabel Patterson take the discrepancy as proof, not of the
tales much vaunted efcacy, but of its irrelevance and try to argue for
a staging in which the mob remains obstreperous. 15 But it does violence to the text to assume with Stephen Coote that Meneniuss mockery of the First Citizen as the great toe of this assembly (1.1.152) only
enrages the mob further rather than amusing them and dissipating
rebellion in laughter. Why should Menenius so signally ignore the
allegedly counterproductive effect of his speech? Must we understand
his subsequent rebuke to Coriolanus, Nay, these are almost thoroughly persuaded (1.1.198), as self-delusion verging on insanity?
Here Menenius is dissuading Coriolanus from the use of force; rather
than imagine that Coriolanuss truculence has dispersed the mob, we
should understand Meneniuss contemptuous remarks about them as
efforts to consolidate his bond with that hero the better to urge him
that speech alone has sufced. As most have felt, the parable of the
belly impressively dramatizes the power of rhetoric to persuade, especially in Roman society, where it was devised for contesting cases in
courts of law. That Menenius turns the citizens empty bellies to a
rhetorical purpose they had not anticipated is not so much hypocrisy
as testimony to the belief that exempla can be inverted, for as Cicero
observes about prosecutorial evidence in the De inventione, the defendant will be able to turn all these arguments about and use them for

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.

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311

a different conclusion. 16 Moreover, as Reuben Brower notes, the point

of the scene does not lie in the fable, but in the way it is acted out,
for quite apart from its debatable metaphorical argument, Meneniuss
speech vividly brings before us on stage the cooperative ideal of the
body politic that this orator advocates as he interacts good-humoredly
with his audience. 17 Reluctant at rst to hear any tale, they are gradually captivated by this one; impatient to proceed to violence, they
are initially annoyed by his expansive dilatorinessYoure long about
it (1.1.124)then gradually seduced by his leisurely manner until the
steam goes out of the riot. In its deliberate amplication, rhetorical
speech often appears to be a consummate embodiment of retardation, and calculated retardation of language is an important part of
the process by which Menenius persuades the mob. 18
With a burst of invective Martius enters and disrupts this process.
By the end of his rst speech, communication has broken down so
thoroughly that he must stop asking the mob, Whats the matter?
and ask Menenius instead, Whats their seeking? (1.1.185). Having
Menenius interpret much as if Martius were a tourist in a foreign city
stresses the heros problematic communication here. Yet Martiuss
tongue-lashing has just displayed extraordinary verbal power, which
is all the more fascinating insofar as it is taboo. Though invective is
often subject to cultural repression, as Kenneth Burke notes, rhetorical conventions such as the vituperatio can sometimes harness it in
socially acceptable wayswitness Ciceros Catilinarian orations. Meneniuss rebuke of the First Citizen has just demonstrated this, and
Antonys famous funeral oration, with its sarcastic mockery of the
honorable men who slew Caesar, shows the younger Shakespeare
well aware of the afnity between rhetoric and satire. 19 Romes archsatirist Juvenal was a thorough rhetorician and was accepted as such
throughout the Renaissance. Indeed, for all his vituperative anger, Coriolanus denounces the citizens in very carefully controlled language:
He that will give good words to thee will atter
Beneath abhorring. What would you have, you curs
That like nor peace nor war? The one affrights you,
The other makes you proud. He that trusts to you,
16. Quoted in Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 129.
17. Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 36.
18. Hans Blumenberg, quoted in Krajewski, Traveling, 49.
19. In addition to Kenneth Burke, Coriolanusand the Delights of Faction, in
Calderwood and Toliver, Essays, 530 47, see esp. Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence
and English Renaissance Literature (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 1924.

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Where he should nd you lions nds you hares,

Where foxes, geese: you are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of re upon the ice
Or hailstone in the sun.
(1.1.16471)

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)

Believing that Martius is almost constitutionally incapable of asking

for favors, Fish describes this speech as a request so phrased as to constitute a virtual command, leaving Cominius no alternative. Nothing
could be further from the mark, for here Shakespeare is determined
to make clear that Martius is perfectly capable of courteous persua20. Van Dyke, Making a Scene, 137.

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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.

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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)

This is not the response of a taciturn man but of an outspoken one,

whose watchword is sincerity. Like Pierre de la Primaudaye in Bowess
translation of The French Academie (1594), he apparently believes that
if there shoulde be discorde between the heart, the tongue, and the
speach, the harmony could not be good. . . . Therefore they [the lungs]
are lodged next to the heart, so that they couer it, to this end that
men should be admonished, that their voyce and their speach is the
messenger of their heart. 29 Among his fellow senators he speaks freely
and forthrightly. As Menenius says, His hearts his mouth. / What his
breast forges, that his tongue must vent (3.1.25960). Presumably he
would agree with old Catos succinct denition of an orator as simply
vir bonus, dicendi peritus.
In Ciceros De oratore the pristine ideal of republican rhetoric remains
the backdrop for his treatment of the orator, and the dialogue form
keeps issues open. Thus when Crassus argues that the actor Roscius is
the model for oratory, Antonius disagrees that public speaking is a
form of acting. Crassuss veneration of technique risks the charge of
insincerity, as Crassus himself confesses with arch embarrassment.
Cicero presents Crassus as both an accomplished orator and a Roman
gentleman of the old school not so far removed from Coriolanus in
spirit as the distance between early and late republican Rome might
suggest. Though four centuries have made electioneering more customary, Coriolanuss shamefaced reluctance in soliciting the votes he
so grudgingly asks for remains reected in this later senators embarrassment about stump speaking: When in quest of an ofce, I used
29. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The Second Part of the French Academie, trans. T. Bowes
(London, 1594), cited by Hoskinss modern editor Hudson in his Notes section following the text of Hoskynss Directions (5556). See Jay Halio, Coriolanus: Shakespeares
Drama of Reconciliation, Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970): 295.

One Line Long

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Michael West and Myron Silberstein

Controversial Eloquence

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in canvassing to send Scaevola away from me, explaining to him that

I proposed to be silly, that is, to make myself winsome using wooing,
and this required some silliness if it was to be well done, whereas our
friend hereScaevola is one of the personages in the dialoguewas
of all men the one in whose presence I was least willing to appear
silly. Yet he it is whom on the present occasion Fate has appointed to
be an eye-witness and observer of my silliness. For what is sillier than
to talk about talking, since talking in itself is ever a silly business, except when it is indispensable. 30
Like that of Ciceros Crassus, Coriolanuss reluctance to engage in
electioneering rhetoric is neither freakish perversity nor general inarticulateness but an expression of Roman virtus. The tribunes represent the modern conception of politics as preoccupied with choices
between issues and interests obtruding upon an older conception
still informing Parliamentary selection in Stuart England to a considerable extentthat elections were community rituals serving to bind
leaders and people together unanimously through reciprocal exchange
of honor, with the emphasis on popular assent rather than consent. 31
Just because Coriolanus feels awkward in that specialized oratorical
context we should not conclude that Shakespeare regards him as no
speaker whatsoever. Indeed, his subversion through voice and gesture
of the humble formulas that he mouths to the people is itself a display of rhetorical nesse, for like most classical and Renaissance rhetoricians Henry Peacham sees irony as an aspect of skilled delivery,
when our meaning is contrary to our saying, not so well perceaued
by the wordes, as eyther by the pronunciation, by the behauyour of
the person, or by the nature of the thing. 32 Though Engle claims that
a completely noble world would be inimical to irony, Shakespeare
dramatizes irony as part of Meneniuss aristocratic hauteur, and the
sardonic, laconic . . . sense of humor that Wilbur Sanders justly notes
in Coriolanus embraces such cultivated irony comfortably enough without compromising his heroic nobility. 33
30. Cicero, De oratore, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1959), 1.24.112. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text
by book, chapter, and line number.
31. See esp. Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in
Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 39; see also D. J. Gordon,
Name and Fame: Shakespeares Coriolanus, in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and
Lectures, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 20319.
32. Henry Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (1577), quoted in Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1983), 77.
33. With Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 195, cf. Wilbur Sanders and Howard
Jacobson, Shakespeares Magnanimity: Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 141.

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Ciceros Antonius distinguishes two kinds of oration in a way that

offers a useful perspective on the plays dramatization of rhetoric.
The suasioan advisory speech to the Senaterequires relatively little
rhetorical apparatus. The contio, however, is addressed to a public
assembly and is of all forms of oratory the closest to theater: maxima
quasi oratoris scaena (De oratore 2.82.33338). Although conciliation of
a mass audience should pervade the entire speech (2.79.322), a carefully calculated exordium is especially necessary to win their goodwill (2.19.80). The exordium should seldom be vehemens et pugnax
(2.78.317), however vehement and aggressive the orator himself may
be, so to that extent rhetorical form demands a certain indirectness
of the speaker addressing a mixed public body whose goodwill cannot
be presumed, like the Senates, but must be won (2.43.182).
These Ciceronian issues and distinctions are very germane to Coriolanus. Perhaps the best way to gauge Shakespeares hero as a speaker
is not to treat him as utterly incapable of communication, but rather
to see him as excelling at some kinds of Roman rhetoric, though not
at others. The rst three acts of the play present Coriolanus as far
from an isolated gure. Instead he is dramatized in a web of family
and social relationships that bind him to Rome as the supreme exemplar of the patrician class. As he embraces his general on the battleeld, so he clasps the hands of his wife and mother on his returnwe
see a man bound to Rome by intimate physical ties that condition his
habits of speech. The play is full of legal language, for as an ofcer
and a legislator Coriolanus is at home with both legal and grammatical performative utterances. 34 Siciniuss threat, It is a mind / That shall
remain a poison where it is, / Not poison any further, draws the following aggrieved response: Shall remain? / Hear you this Triton of
the minnows? Mark you / His absolute shall? (3.1.8892). The misuse
of shall that launches Coriolanus into his angry speech to the Senate
suggests that he is not indifferent to verbal forms. Cominius agrees,
Twas from the canon. 35 In the lengthy address that ensues, Coriolanus is vehemently defending the canons of Roman political custom
and aggressively exemplifying the stylistic canons of the suasio. Ignoring the tribunes, he speaks to his fellow senators as an audience with

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.

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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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compound predicate, once again a stylistic hallmark meant to attest

to his command of formal eloquence:
Purpose so barred, it follows
Nothing is done to purpose. Therefore beseech you
You that will be less fearful than discreet,
That love the fundamental part of state
More than you doubt the change ont, that prefer
A noble life before a long, and wish
To jump a body with a dangerous physic
Thats sure of death without itat once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison.
(3.1.15059)

Though some modern critics seem unaware of the technical sense in

which action is eloquence (3.2.78), this speaker scarcely needs his
mothers later reminder to that effect. 38 He evidently begins his
peroration with a rhetorical gesture indicating the two tribunes who
physically bar his progress. According to Abraham Fraunces Arcadian
Rhetorike (1588), such casting out of the right arme is as it were an
arming of the speach, and becommeth continued and owing sentences, where verie speach it selfe seemeth to powre forth it self with
the stretching out of the arme. 39 One seventeenth-century emblem
book depicts a conventionally allegorized hand of God reaching down
from a cloud and grasping an unruly dismembered tongue that it has
evidently plucked out. 40 Suffused with a lordly disdain for popular
but misleading sweets of the tongue, Coriolanuss embodied speech
is a model of deliberative rhetoric according to Kennedy, and, indeed, probably Shakespeares nest oration in that vein.
How so many critics in recent decades have contrived to ignore that
judgment is an interesting question in its own right. The Coriolanus
who addresses his fellow senators in this scene is not a complete isolato. When Sicinius promptly calls him a traitor, he responds, Thou
wretch, despite oerwhelm thee! (3.1.165). The scorn that he calls
38. For example, Dennis Bathory, With himself at war: Shakespeares Roman
Hero and the Republican Tradition, in Shakespeares Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics, ed. Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 1996), 249. On the importance of such implicit gestures in Shakespeare, see David
Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeares Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
39. Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588; reprint, Menston: Scolar, 1969),
sig. K2r.
40. See Carla Mazzio, Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England, Modern Language Studies 28 (1998): 113n.

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down upon the tribune is an explicitly social sanction. Conding in

aristocratic contempt, he dismisses Sicinius as almost unworthy of
notice and once again attempts to rally support among the senators
for his political counterrevolution. Only after his mother and his colleagues urge him to return to the marketplace and placate the people
with fair speech (which they frankly dene as acting a feigned role)
does he irrevocably equate speech with playing a part and recoil from
it as insincerity. Charged as a traitor for the second time, he explodes,
The res ith lowest hell fold in the people! With his condence in
social sanctions sapped by the lying tongue of an injurious tribune
whose insult goes unchallenged by his friends, the man who could not
abide to hear his nothings monstered becomes the self-styled lonely
dragon who grandly proclaims, I banish you! (3.3.68124).
Yet even at his most solipsistic, when he visits Antium to offer his
service to his former enemies, he retains enough integrity to make
him almost ipso facto a persuasive speaker. A speech of thirty-ve
lines explaining his mission to Audius draws this response from his
mortal enemy: O Martius, Martius! / Each word thou hast spoke
hath weeded from my heart / A root of ancient envy. If Jupiter /
Should from yon cloud speak divine things / And say Tis true, Id
not believe them more / Than thee, all-noble Martius (4.5.1027).
Audiuss magnanimity here, which has little precedent in Norths Plutarch, is specically dramatized by Shakespeare as a noble response
to the eloquent frankness of Coriolanuss speechnot as the prudent
calculation of a strange political bedfellow. In the Aristotelian rhetorical terminology with which Shakespeare was almost certainly familiar,
this appeal converts Audius by addressing his ethos even more than
his logos or pathos, making him admire the character of his hated rival.
That is surely no mean oratorical feat. Coriolanus is still quite capable
of using language persuasively when he imagines himself as one heroic soul appealing to others.
Indeed, Coriolanus seems such an eloquent speaker to Audius
that the latter fears that upon returning to Antium, Coriolanus will
purge himself with words (5.6.8). When Coriolanus does enter
marching with drum and colors, the stage direction signicantly adds,
the Commoners being with him. So far are the conspirators from thinking Coriolanus an ineffective orator that they urge Audius to kill him
ere he express himself or move the people / With what he would say.
. . . When he lies along, / After your way his tale pronouncd shall
bury / His reasons with his body (5.6.5559). They imply that Audius
is as unable to defeat Coriolanus in a fair debate as on the eld of battle.
To concede Coriolanuss impressive eloquence is not to deny the defects revealed through his habits of speech. The vituperative energy

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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.

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more logical approach to oratory, Coriolanus resembles not so much

a Roman Rambo as a Roman Ramist, a pre-Christian Puritan.
Yet he remains rooted in the republic that produced Cicero. With
the Elizabethan Ciceronian Roger Ascham he might cry, Ye know not
what hurt ye do to learning, that . . . make a deuorse betwixt the tong
and the hart. 44 Coriolanus is often criticized for ignoring the social
morality expounded in Meneniuss fable of the belly: the need for organic unity among all the members of the commonwealth, which was
expounded by Edward Forset in A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies
Natural and Politique (1606). But Coriolanus violates the metaphorical
claims of the social organism mainly to defend his bodily and psychic
unity. His equations between speech and physical action, his profound fear that hypocritical posing will emasculate him by forcing
him to assume a harlots spirit (3.2.114), reect a man for whom
word and deed, body and soul, are fused in an extraordinary sense of
personal integrity. Criticism unsympathetic to Coriolanus does not always explain convincingly why an audience should reject this heroic
individuals struggle for psychological and physiological coherence
while accepting a morality of social coherence justied by stridently
corporeal analogies. Thus recent historicist critics who have argued
for a subversive left-wing intention in the play overstate their case. 45
In Ciceros De oratore, Antonius inquires how much rhetorical ability
is needed to write history. If he is to write as the Greeks have written, answers Catulus, a man of supreme ability is required; if the
standard is to be that of our own fellow-countrymen, no orator at all
is needed; it is enough that the man should not be a liar (2.12.51).
The Greeks may need panegyrists, he implies, but Roman deeds extol
themselves. After Audius has called him a boy of tears, such attitudes underlie Coriolanuss penultimate speech:
Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads
Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound,
If you have writ your annals true, tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it, boy!
(5.6.11217)

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.

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Coriolanuss shortcomings as an all-purpose speaker may not aw

him as deeply as critics suppose, for Shakespeare seems rather skeptical of eloquence as a virtue. 49 When not positively evil, suasion in
Shakespearean drama is generally futile or unfortunate in its results.
Surprisingly few characters ever succeed in persuading others to virtuous courses of action. To stigmatize Coriolanus for not excelling
Shakespeares other orators in this respect seems unfairespecially
since few modern statesmen have spoken more eloquently, while contemporary politicians renowned for oratorical nesse have not always
proved the most respected and effective leaders.
If modern American culture remains conicted over the value of
rhetoric, early modern England was no less so, as several recent studies have emphasized. Of the many commonplaces in the Elizabethan
discipline of language, observes Jane Donawerth, none stands uncontested. 50 While the early Renaissance invested high hopes in the
cultivation of language as a way of exercising real power, there were
many nominalists and few realists. Despite all the free-oating Neoplatonic jargon, the wide-spread continental interest in philosophical
word-magic nds no parallel in England. 51 But while most Elizabethans took for granted the articiality of words and the radical
disjunction between words and things, this seldom led to the deconstructionist view that words are mainly about words, for only if both
are thought to exist can one say that words are different from things. 52
Thus with pithye eloquence the orator might wield real power, and
what worthier thing can there be, then with a word to winne cities
and whole countries? asked Thomas Wilson. 53 But the worth of this
enterprise was not always apparent to the owners of the castles that
might succumb to the eloquent tongue battery. It was requisite that
49. See esp. Brian Vickers, The Power of Persuasion: Images of the Orator, Elyot to
Shakespeare, in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance
Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 41135;
also his Shakespeare: Coriolanus (London: Arnold, 1976), and Teaching Coriolanus:
The Importance of Perspective, in Teaching Shakespeare, ed. Walter Edens et al. (Princeton University Press, 1977), 22870. Vickerss interpretation of the play seems implausible in several respects: e.g., in viewing the hero as a modest man ruled by love and in
treating all the plays oratory as evil eloquence. But his sensitivity to rhetorical issues
encourages a healthy skepticism about other characters self-serving descriptions of
Coriolanus that lets us begin to recapture the tragic dimension of the drama. On the
political and moral biases that sway reactions to the hero, see also Houston, Shakespearean
Sentences, 178.
50. Donawerth, Shakespeare, 4.
51. Ibid., 40.
52. Trousdale, Shakespeare, 162.
53. Wilson, Arte, 56.

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the excellente Capitaines were oratours, claimed Machiavelli in The

Art of Warand that sent a shiver down many a Renaissance princes
spine. 54 Hand in hand with humanist reverence for orators commanding the ear of absolutist power, one recent study demonstrates, there
was always fear of them as potential demagogues, tribunes, baseborn
outsiders who might unsettle the status quo rather than consolidate
it. While the seductive power of speech was often gured as feminine,
leading to fears that the rhetor may be emasculated by the art he
practices, turned into an effeminate man, other Renaissance theorists
reacted by stressing the violence of the orators penetration . . . of
his listeners soul as a mode of aggressive, phallic assault. 55 O Ambivalent Organ, Erasmus apostrophized the tongue in De lingua (1525),
worried by its potential destructiveness. 56 The orator should be a
good man, classical rhetoric stipulated. But was he always? Mercury
the god of eloquence was also the god of thieves.
The dawn of the seventeenth century in England saw increasing
skepticism about language and its arts. In the sixteenth century, it
was assumed that defects in men brought about confused speech; in
the seventeenth century, it became widely held that confused speech
brings on many of the defects in man. 57 Whereas the early Renaissance celebrated languages power to create common understanding,
the seventeenth century wondered with Locke whether words simply
projected one individuals ideas and dreamed of inventing universal
languages to circumvent solipsism. Diminished condence in language
colors the Jacobean era. For Francis Bacon words were Idols of the
Marketplace. Scriptural texts like Proverbs 18:21 and the perfervid
apostolic denunciations of James 3:5156 lie behind John Abernethys
The Poisonous Tongue (1622). In Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and
the Five Senses for Superiority (1607), the university dramatist Thomas
Tomkis articulated the fear that by making rhetoric wanton the
tongue was usurping bodily authority and jeopardizing social hierarchy; his learned play was sufciently popular to go through ve Jacobean editions. 58 Stylistically, Ben Jonson favored Senecan terseness
over Marlovian amplitude, and his play Catiline (1611) dramatizes
Ciceros triumph ambiguously, for Catilines jibes that he is really
54. Quoted in Rhodes, Power, 39.
55. Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Mens Minds: Literature and the Renaissance
Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 143, 148; see also
chaps. 12.
56. Quoted in Mazzio, Sins, 95.
57. Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeares View of Language, Shakespeare Quarterly 29
(1978): 381.
58. Quoted in Mazzio, Sins, 106.

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just a boasting, insolent tongue-man do not, in fact, sound limp but

reect the decreasing respect for Elizabethan copia. As Neil Rhodes
observes, the anti-rhetorical values of Catilines last speech are those
of the future. 59
Indeed, with the gradual ascendancy of masques, those antirhetorical
values came to prevail in court drama far more than Jonson wished,
for as Morris Croll rst argued, skeptical anti-Ciceronianism was linked
to political absolutism. 60 The popular stage that nurtured Shakespeares plays throve on a love of language in its audiences, for the
Elizabethan player was rst and foremost a consummate rhetorician.
In the excellent actor, claimed Sir Thomas Overburys Characters
(1615), whatsoever is commendable to the grave Orator, is most exquisitly perfect. 61 But Inigo Joness proscenium framed a stage that
cultivated visual over verbal effects, turning hearers into spectators
and subordinating poetry to scenery, as Jonson observed with dismay.
Extolling the eloquent orator as emonge all menne, not onelye to be
taken for a singuler manne, but rather to be counted for halfe a God,
Thomas Wilson was less elitist than he might seem, for such perfervid
Renaissance praise of rhetoric was grounded in the humanist assumption that anyone with talent (whether a Roman patrician or a glovers
son in Stratford) could learn the art. 62 In the Nicomachean Ethics,

59. Rhodes, Power, 19294.

60. See Morris W. Croll, The Anti-Ciceronian Movement: Attic and Baroque Prose
Style, pt. 1 in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton University Press, 1966), 3233. In Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England, New Literary History 14 (1983): 597621, Heinrich F. Plett modies
Crolls inuential taxonomy by emphasizing that elaborately ornamental rhetoric was
well-adapted to foster court power, while in The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and
Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1
23, Kenneth J. E. Graham reminds us that varieties of terse anti-Ciceronian style were
also deployed to challenge political absolutism. But Crolls thesis that Renaissance hostility to rhetoric was often linked to sympathy for authoritarian government remains
persuasive; indeed, Grahams reading of Coriolanus relies heavily on it to paint an
angry hero with a naive craving for verbal magic whose antirhetorical desire to unite
words and deeds thus fosters an absolutist political stance (185). However, Coriolanus
is not Richard II. From our perspective, Grahams interpretation overlooks that this republican senator commenced his political career by helping overthrow an authoritarian monarch, that his speeches to fellow senators bear clear marks of rhetorical
organization such as the tricolon, and that there is much to be said intellectually for his
logical rigor and morally for his passionate commitment to personal integrity. Unlike
Graham, we nd the play lacking neither shared criteria of truth nor dramatically justied private convictions, 186.
61. Quoted in B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), 5.
62. Wilson, Arte, 11.

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Aristotle had toyed with the idea that by exemplifying superhuman

excellence on a heroic or divine scale a few men might be exempt
from ethical rules and approach godhood. At times Coriolanuss
apparent sovereignty of nature (4.7.35) invites comparison with
this idea of innate, supramoral, transcendent heroic virtue. But by
stressing the shaping inuence of Roman culture and especially Volumnias role, Shakespeares play makes his preeminence seem learned,
a matter of upbringing and social conditioning rather than unique
heroic transcendence, owing more to nurture than to nature. As Elizabethan commoners could learn to be orators (or actors), so they might
aspire to make themselves into heroesor, from the nervous perspective of Stuart absolutism, republican rebels. Jacobean and Caroline
court drama revolved around the glorication of a monarch de iure
divino whose excellence needed not so much to be demonstrated by
deeds or witnessed by words as revealed through ritual. In the masques
devoted to the royal mystique, James never spoke or played a role
(except as spectator), although he believed that a King is as one set
on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly do behold. 63 The self-made professional actors with well-honed
rhetorical skills were typically relegated to speaking roles in the antimasques, portraying disreputable elements resisting governance, while
the masquers embodying the aristocratic virtues displayed them less
in speech than in dance.
All this cultural ambivalence toward rhetoric forms the intellectual
context of Coriolanus (ca. 1608?), just as the Midlands agricultural riots
form its political context. The play is essentially contemporary with
the De Laconismo (1609) of Puteanus, the disciple of Justus Lipsius
perhaps most committed to the stylistic campaign launched by his
master and waged on many fronts against the excesses of Renaissance
Ciceronianism. Many recent critics nd political theory the plays raison dtre, so if that is set aside, one of them claims, nothing of
interest, of plot or character, remains. 64 That conviction bespeaks a
frighteningly narrow range of interest, for politics aside, extremely
intriguing issues about language remain. Coriolanuss very real oratorical powers dramatize Renaissance respect for persuasive or even
aggressive speech; signicantly, his base opponents, the tribunes, are
portrayed as privy intriguers rather than notable public speakers. But
Coriolanuss considerable mistrust of language represents the other
63. Quoted in Stephen Orgel, Making Greatness Familiar, in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David M. Bergeron (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 25.
64. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1989), 120.

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strand in the contemporary discourse of rhetoric. Indeed, there is

good reason to suppose that Shakespeare shared the ambivalence of
his age and was by no means unsympathetic to his heros reluctance
to acknowledge the power of words. Shakespeares attitude toward
the oratio-ratio theorem had been tinged by skepticism early on,
argues Heinrich Plett. This is evident in the eventual failure of those
gures who stand for a rhetoric of social harmonyBrutus, Menenius
Agrippa, Othello. It becomes even more pronounced in Shakespeares
new oratorical typethe anti-rhetorician. If Coriolanus is to be viewed
as an antirhetorician, that places him in distinguished moral company,
for the other notable example of the type that Plett identies in the
later canon is Cordelia, whose silence, like Virgilias, signals neither
meekness nor submissiveness but, rather, a protest against a rhetoric
of false semblance. 65 Even Coriolanuss foe Audius notes that such
oratory diminishes power rather than enhances it: Power, unto itself
most commendable, / Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair / Textol
what it hath done (4.7.5153). To a self-evident truth, as another critic
observes, a gracious silence is the only reliable sign of consent. 66
Coriolanuss denunciations of language merely voice out loud what
more taciturn and tactful antirhetoricians imply about its corruption.
To respond to Coriolanuss nal words as childish grandiloquence,
a specimen of tragical satire, is to show a peevish lack of generosity
to a protagonist who, however awed, towers over everyone else in
the play. In a world dominated by ludicrously unstable opinions, and
otherwise apparently devoid of the divine, Coriolanuss belief in a
self-regarding noble ideal and in the special relationship of his nobility
to the gods comes to bear an enormous weight as the sole alternative source of value. 67 He has a genuine grandeur that trendily politicized modern interpretations often ignore. As R. B. Parker notes of
recent productions, In our age of on-the-spot television, wide-screen
cinema, and the fear of global disaster, it is difcult for directors and
actors to recreate an adequate sense of enthusiasm for Martius prowess as a warrior. 68 Less hostile to his political and heroic ethos than
are most contemporary academics, Shakespeare could view Coriolanus
with qualied admiration. His nal speech sums up the paradoxicalness of a man who strove heroically though unsuccessfully for more

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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integrity than most human beings possess. Admiration and contempt

are both far too powerful to be denied; yet they refuse to coalesce
into a single sentiment, Sanders justly observes, so to begrudge him
admiration where due is to fall into that meanness of envy, of which
there are many examples in the play. 69
Speech-act theory will teach us little about this play if we forget the
more ancient theory of speeches embodied in classical rhetoric. There
had always been a native tradition of terse, plainspoken Roman rhetoric exemplied by Cato the Elder, and in the declining republic this
led to the movement known as Atticism, which stressed pure and
sometimes even faintly archaic Latinity. In Brutus and Orator, Cicero
contrasts at some length his own more elaborate practice with such
eloquent advocates of Attic simplicity as Caesar, Calvus, and Brutus.
All parties to the debate professed to admire Demosthenes, whom
the Roman Atticists pointed to as an alternative to Ciceronian standards, and this controversy fed into the Renaissance anti-Ciceronians
views. Contrasting Ciceros diffuse amplication with Demosthenes
terse vigor, the rhetorician Longinus could thus nd rugged sublimity in the latters violence, yes, and his speed, his force, his terric
power of rhetoric . . . [like] a ash of lightning or a thunder-bolt. . . .
Nervous force comes in his intensity and violent emotion, and in passages where he has utterly to dumbfounder the audience. 70 We need
to reawaken and expand our taste for rhetoric so that we can imagine
the valedictory words of Coriolanus as an example of what Longinus
describes as the oratorical sublime, linking it less with Cicero than
with Romes Attic school of orators (and by extension with their
anti-Ciceronian Renaissance counterparts). Like Regulus, this Roman
hero sacrices his immediate self-interest to score an equivocal moral
triumph over his enemies. The paucity of soliloquies in the play leads
many to conclude that Coriolanus is the least introspective of Shakespeares major tragic guresand therefore perhaps not even very
tragic. 71 But public language has its own potential for tension, for the
69. Sanders and Jacobson, Shakespeares Magnanimity, 145 46; see also Cantor, Shakespeares Rome, 9498, on the value of Coriolanuss struggle for integrity.
70. Longinus, On the Sublime, 12.45, ed. and trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, in Aristotle,
The Poetics (London: Heinemann, 1927). Longinuss distinction helps clarify Parkers
sense that Coriolanuss driven syntax contrasts strikingly with the Ciceronian fullness in the public style of Menenius and the Tribunes and especially in the copious
loquacity of Volumnia (Introduction, 7576). On the controversy over Atticism reected in Ciceros later works and Longinus, see George A. Kennedy, A New History of
Classical Rhetoric (Princeton University Press, 1994), 15166, 19192.
71. Stanley D. McKenzie, Unshout the noise that banishd Martius: Structural
Paradox and Dissembling in Coriolanus, Shakespeare Studies 18 (1996): 189. Contrast,

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complex linguistic anxieties of an age may boil up within it. When

that happens in Coriolanus, what is dramatized in its hero is surely the
tormented and conicted psyche we associate with tragedy. 72 Paradoxically, Jacobean anxiety about the sinister power of the tongue
was the hallmark of an era when the tongue was increasingly powerless as print culture proliferated, alienating linguistic representation
from the body. Exemplifying both the power and the powerlessness
of the tongue, this play enacts not only the tragedy of its hero but the
larger tragedy of Renaissance rhetoric.

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.

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