Coriolanus

Summary

Coriolanus, probably written in 1608, is Shakespeare's last Roman tragedy and his harshest study of a city at odds with itself. It is set in the early Roman republic, around 494-491 BC, just after the kings have been expelled, when hungry plebeians demanded grain and won the right to elect tribunes. The play opens with citizens armed with clubs, resolved to kill Caius Martius, whom they call 'chief enemy to the people', and to have corn at their own price. The patrician Menenius Agrippa calms them with the fable of the belly: the members of the body once rebelled against the belly as idle, until it explained that it sends nourishment to every part. Martius arrives and pours contempt on the crowd, then learns that the Volscians are in arms. At the Volscian town of Corioles, Martius fights his way inside the gates alone and then helps rout the enemy army; for this he is given the surname Coriolanus. His mother Volumnia, who has raised him to glory in wounds, wants him made consul. The Senate approves, but custom requires him to put on the gown of humility in the marketplace, show his wounds and ask the citizens for their 'voices'. He does so with barely hidden scorn. The tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, who fear his power, persuade the people to revoke their consent. When Coriolanus rages that giving grain freely and sharing power with tribunes will destroy the state, the tribunes charge him with treason. Volumnia and Menenius persuade him to return and speak mildly, but when the tribunes call him a traitor his temper breaks, and Rome banishes him. He answers, 'I banish you!' In disguise he goes to Antium and offers himself to his old enemy Tullus Aufidius, either to lead the Volscians against Rome or to be killed. Aufidius embraces him, and together they march on the city. Cominius and Menenius plead with him and are rejected. Then Volumnia comes with his wife Virgilia, his young son and the noblewoman Valeria. After a long speech she kneels, and Coriolanus, holding her hand in silence, gives way and makes a peace that spares Rome, knowing it may be 'most mortal' to him. Back in Corioles, Aufidius accuses him of treachery and taunts him as a 'boy of tears'; Coriolanus boasts how he fluttered the Volscians 'like an eagle in a dovecote', and the conspirators kill him. Aufidius, suddenly sorrowful, orders that he 'shall have a noble memory'. The play gives strong arguments to every party: the hungry citizens, the patrician friend, the scheming tribunes, the proud general, and the mother who made him. It leaves students to judge how far courage without self-command, or a city without gratitude, can stand.

Top Lessons

• The fable of the belly and the body politic

  Menenius answers a hunger riot with an old political allegory, also found in Livy and Plutarch: the body's members rebel against the belly, which replies that it sends nourishment to all. The fable is clever and partly true, but it is told to men who are actually starving, and the First Citizen interrupts it with a list of the body's more active parts. The scene teaches students to admire an argument's form while asking whom it serves and whether it answers the complaint.

• Courage without humility: the gown and the wounds

  Roman custom asks the victorious general to stand in a humble gown and show his wounds to the people. Coriolanus's courage is real; his refusal to ask is also real. He would rather have his wounds 'to heal again / Than hear say how I got them', and his request for votes becomes mockery. Shakespeare shows a man whose virtue is bound up with a pride that cannot receive gifts or depend on others. Classical Christian students can weigh this against the scriptural account of courage joined to meekness without turning the play into a sermon.

• Volumnia: the mother who made the soldier

  Volumnia rejoices that her son is wounded, tells Virgilia that blood becomes a man more than gold, counsels him to dissemble, and claims, 'Thy valiantness was mine'. Her final plea saves Rome by appealing to the very kinship her son had sworn to ignore. She is neither villain nor simple heroine. Students can trace how an upbringing forms a character and still leave the grown man responsible for his choices.

• 'As if a man were author of himself'

  Before the women plead, Coriolanus resolves to 'stand / As if a man were author of himself, / And knew no other kin.' The phrase names the illusion at the centre of the tragedy: a man who has defined himself by refusing need is undone by the claims of mother, wife and child. Exile from Rome has not made him free; it has made him a weapon in another city's hands. Silence before his mother is the play's turning point.

• Tribunes, voices and the interpretation of the time

  The tribunes are not wrong to fear a consul who calls for their office to be abolished, yet they manipulate the citizens and provoke the outburst they need. Aufidius, watching from outside, reflects that 'our virtues / Lie in th' interpretation of the time'. The play offers no faction as wholly right, which makes it an excellent text for practising fair political judgment and resisting partisanship.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Coriolanus is not about medicine, but it is saturated with the bodily language of early modern physiology and surgery. Menenius's belly fable describes digestion and distribution in Galenic terms: the belly as 'storehouse and shop' sending nourishment through 'the rivers of your blood' to heart and brain. Wounds are a political currency, counted, displayed and refused, and Menenius jokes that a letter from Martius is better than 'the most sovereign prescription in Galen'. In Act 3 the quarrel is argued in surgical terms of disease, infection, gangrene and amputation. The opening scene's famine gives hunger a concrete social cause. These are metaphors and incidents, not a sustained medical subject, so relevance is kept low.

• Act 1, Scene 1

  Menenius's fable of the belly and the members, with its account of nourishment sent through the blood to heart, brain, nerves and veins; framed by a riot over grain and hunger.

• Act 1, Scene 3

  Volumnia tells Virgilia that blood becomes a man more than gilt and compares Hector's bleeding forehead to Hecuba's breasts.

• Act 2, Scene 1

  Menenius mocks Galen's prescriptions as 'empiricutic' beside the cheering effect of Martius's letter, then he and Volumnia count and locate Martius's wounds with pride.

• Act 2, Scenes 2-3

  The custom of showing wounds to the people in the gown of humility, which Coriolanus resists and performs with contempt.

• Act 3, Scene 1

  The tribunes call Coriolanus a disease to be cut away and an infection of catching nature; Menenius argues for cure rather than amputation and invokes a gangrened foot.