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The Controversial Eloquence of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—an Anti‐Ciceronian Orator?Author(s): Michael West and Myron SilbersteinSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 102, No. 3 (February 2005), pp. 307-331Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/432691 .

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For the past four decades,

Coriolanus

has been interpreted as a playabout language, but with curiously contradictory results. “Coriolanushas a natural antipathy to eloquence,” claims one critic; “he is emphat-ically ‘no orator.’ ” “Lacking the verbal resources and the confidencein language required for effective argument, he remains taciturn when-ever possible,” adds another, while a third terms him “the only cen-tral character in Shakespeare who is an inadequate speaker.”

1

In aninfluential essay arguing that for Coriolanus “the circulation of lan-guage is an expression of cannibalism,” Stanley Cavell likewise finds“the words of this particular play . . . uncharacteristically ineloquent”and claims that insofar as Coriolanus can’t express desire he “cannotspeak at all.”

2

“Coriolanus is antirhetoric,” echoes one critic.

3

Hisbodiliness “is utterly unrelated to Volumnia’s life of speech,” anotheragrees.

4

Reviewing such linguistic studies, one recent article concurs

1. Maurice Charney,

Shakespeare’s Roman Plays

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1963), 34–35; James L. Calderwood, “

Coriolanus

: Wordless Meanings and Meaning-less Words,” in

Essays in Shakespearean Criticism

, ed. James L. Calderwood and HaroldE. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 551; John Porter Houston,

Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-versity 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; LawrenceDanson,

Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare’s Drama of Language

(New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-sity 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: Uni-versity of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 52.

4. Jarrett Walker, “Voiceless Bodies and Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human Per-ception in

Coriolanus

,”

Shakespeare Quarterly

43 (1992): 182.

The Controversial Eloquence of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—an Anti-Ciceronian Orator?

M I C H A E L W E S T

University of Pittsburgh

M Y R O N S I L B E R S T E I N

University of Chicago



M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y

308

that Coriolanus “seems deeply suspicious of language,” while anotherdescribes him as “the least intellectual of Shakespeare’s major tragicprotagonists.”

5

Underpinning much criticism in this vein is the assump-tion that Caius Martius’s supposed inarticulateness stamps him as asort of Roman Rambo, so that the play is “Shakespeare’s last and mostemphatic denunciation of heroic values.”

6

When combined with the political issues preoccupying scholars whonow pay increased attention to the agricultural riots that figured im-portantly in the play’s Jacobean context, this conception of the heromakes, at least, for eloquent critical sermonizing. But was it Shake-speare’s conception? It was certainly not that of Plutarch, who struc-tured the hero’s speeches around the figures of Roman rhetoric, forin Sir Thomas North’s translation Coriolanus is specifically describedas having “an eloquent tongue.”

7

If Shakespeare altered Plutarch’shero in this respect, the change escaped the sharp eye of A. C. Brad-ley, who judged that “he is very eloquent.”

8

With some reluctance,another critic agreed that “Coriolanus is not in fact deficient in intel-ligence as he demonstrates in his clear-sighted and well-marshalledaddress to the senators.”

9

The point is buttressed by Milton BooneKennedy’s study of the oration in Shakespearean drama, still a stan-dard work though it dates from the 1940s. Formal orations were mostfrequent in the histories, Kennedy found, diminishing in the tragicperiod, which furnishes only thirteen examples of the form. Five ofthese occur in

Coriolanus

, more than in any other great tragedy, andKennedy judged that those of the hero were easily Shakespeare’sfinest examples of stage oratory: “In the emotional rhetoric of Cor-iolanus Shakespeare seems to have risen to some of his best utter-

5. Burton Hatlen, “The ‘Noble Thing’ and the ‘Boy of Tears’:

Coriolanus

and the Em-barrassments of Identity,”

English Literary Renaissance

27 (1997): 411; Maurice Hunt,“ ‘Violent’st’ Complementarity: The Double Warriors of

Coriolanus

,”

Studies in EnglishLiterature

31 (1991): 314. In “What Hath a Quarter-Century of Coriolanus CriticismWrought?” in

The Shakespearean International Yearbook II: Where Are We Now in Shake-speare Studies?

ed. W. R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002),68–69, Lee Bliss confirms that such opinions predominate among recent rhetoricallyoriented critics of the play.

6. Citing previous studies by Victoria Kahn, Janet Adelman, Steven Marx, andMadelon Sprengnether, in “ ‘Manhood and Chevalrie’:

Coriolanus

, Prince Henry, andthe Chivalric Revival,”

Review of English Studies

51 (2000): 422, Robin Headlam Wellsreaches this conclusion.

7. Sir Thomas North, trans.,

Coriolanus

, in

Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shake-speare

, 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.



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 theplay praise his characteristically “hard, brilliant, cutting eloquence” asproviding “a rhetorical equivalent of his conduct on the battlefield.”

11

Indeed, it has been cogently argued that the hero’s peculiarity “is notan insensitivity to words; rather he is uncommonly sensitive to them.”

12

Were he not, the play might be excruciating in the theater, for thesurprising fact is that this supposed verbal incompetent speaks vol-umes of words. Only two of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes have morelines, and Coriolanus’s role is one of the fattest in the entire canon.

The issue of language is indeed at the core of the drama, as StanleyFish has suggested in a stimulating essay applying speech-act theoryto the play; but as James Marlow noted, the results were rather fishyinsofar as the hero emerged as an inarticulate isolato who can onlypromise or curse with gusto, who abhors asking or praising, andwho scarcely ever communicates within his solipsistic universe of dis-course.

13

Like Cavell, Fish seems reluctant to acknowledge the moraland political shortcomings of the Roman society dramatized. We needan interpretation of the play that can account for such radically diver-gent views of the hero’s rhetorical ability or lack of it. The thesis andantithesis of prior criticism yield a plausible synthesis if contextualizedwith more historical detail. Roman and Renaissance attitudes towardrhetoric illuminate the behavior of Coriolanus at many points. He isnot the tongue-tied rhetorical ignoramus some of his detractors haveconjured up. True, this republican hero rarely expresses himself withCiceronian amplitude, but Cicero’s was by no means the only form oforatory admired in the Renaissance. An adequate reading of the playshould define the kinds of eloquence that Coriolanus attempts whileconceding both his virtues and his limitations as a public speaker.

“Before we proceed any further, hear me speak,” proclaims the FirstCitizen to his mutinous fellows as the play opens. “Speak, speak,” they

10. Milton Boone Kennedy,

The Oration in Shakespeare

(Chapel Hill: University ofNorth 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

,”

Shake-speare 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): 983–1025; James Marlow, “FishDoing Things with Austin and Searle,”

Modern Language Notes

91 (1976): 1603–12. Forfurther criticism of Fish and Cavell, see Gary Wihl,

The Contingency of Theory: Pragma-tism, Expressivism, and Deconstruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 119–37; John Plotz, “Coriolanus and the Failure of Performatives,” ELH 63 (1996): 809–32.



M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y310

reply, cheerfully adjourning their rebellion for the nonce (1.1.1–3).14

The plebeians are an eminently malleable lot, for a mob is by definitionmobile, and as the famous simile that greets schoolboys at the begin-ning of Virgil’s Aeneid suggests, Roman culture was built on reverencefor the skilled orator who can calm a riot with rhetorical prowess.Rhetorical prowess is needed, to be sure, for, like that of the Mid-lands agricultural rioters, this mob’s hunger is real, however ground-less their notion that the rich take positive pleasure in seeing themstarve (1.1.18–21). But whereas food is definitely not being distributedto them by the patricians, Menenius seeks to assuage their hungerwith a parable of social harmony in which the patricians figure as agenerous belly supplying all the body politic’s members with figura-tive nourishment and left only with the bran. Refusing to believe thatempty bellies can be so easily satisfied with allegorical food, a few crit-ics like Annabel Patterson take the discrepancy as “proof, not of thetale’s much vaunted efficacy, but of its irrelevance” and try to argue fora staging in which the mob remains obstreperous.15 But it does vio-lence to the text to assume with Stephen Coote that Menenius’s mock-ery of the First Citizen as “the great toe of this assembly” (1.1.152) onlyenrages the mob further rather than amusing them and dissipatingrebellion in laughter. Why should Menenius so signally ignore theallegedly counterproductive effect of his speech? Must we understandhis subsequent rebuke to Coriolanus, “Nay, these are almost thor-oughly persuaded” (1.1.198), as self-delusion verging on insanity?Here Menenius is dissuading Coriolanus from the use of force; ratherthan imagine that Coriolanus’s truculence has dispersed the mob, weshould understand Menenius’s contemptuous remarks about them asefforts to consolidate his bond with that hero the better to urge himthat speech alone has sufficed. As most have felt, the parable of thebelly impressively dramatizes the power of rhetoric to persuade, es-pecially in Roman society, where it was devised for contesting cases incourts of law. That Menenius turns the citizens’ empty bellies to arhetorical purpose they had not anticipated is not so much hypocrisyas testimony to the belief that exempla can be inverted, for as Ciceroobserves about prosecutorial evidence in the De inventione, the defen-dant “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 edi-tion 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’ manipulativecynicism has failed.”



Michael West and Myron Silberstein „ Controversial Eloquence 311

a different conclusion.”16 Moreover, as Reuben Brower notes, the pointof the scene “does not lie in the fable, but in the way it is acted out,”for quite apart from its debatable metaphorical argument, Menenius’sspeech vividly brings before us on stage the cooperative ideal of thebody politic that this orator advocates as he interacts good-humoredlywith his audience.17 Reluctant at first to hear any tale, they are grad-ually captivated by this one; impatient to proceed to violence, theyare initially annoyed by his expansive dilatoriness—“You’re long aboutit” (1.1.124)—then gradually seduced by his leisurely manner until thesteam goes out of the riot. In its deliberate amplification, rhetoricalspeech often appears to be “a consummate embodiment of retarda-tion,” and calculated retardation of language is an important part ofthe process by which Menenius persuades the mob.18

With a burst of invective Martius enters and disrupts this process.By the end of his first speech, communication has broken down sothoroughly that he must stop asking the mob, “What’s the matter?”and ask Menenius instead, “What’s their seeking?” (1.1.185). HavingMenenius interpret much as if Martius were a tourist in a foreign citystresses the hero’s problematic communication here. Yet Martius’stongue-lashing has just displayed extraordinary verbal power, whichis all the more fascinating insofar as it is taboo. Though invective isoften subject to cultural repression, as Kenneth Burke notes, rhetor-ical conventions such as the vituperatio can sometimes harness it insocially acceptable ways—witness Cicero’s Catilinarian orations. Me-nenius’s rebuke of the First Citizen has just demonstrated this, andAntony’s famous funeral oration, with its sarcastic mockery of the“honorable men” who slew Caesar, shows the younger Shakespearewell aware of the affinity between rhetoric and satire.19 Rome’s arch-satirist Juvenal was a thorough rhetorician and was accepted as suchthroughout the Renaissance. Indeed, for all his vituperative anger, Cor-iolanus denounces the citizens in very carefully controlled language:

He that will give good words to thee will flatterBeneath abhorring. What would you have, you cursThat 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: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 1982), 129.

17. Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradi-tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 36.

18. Hans Blumenberg, quoted in Krajewski, Traveling, 49.19. In addition to Kenneth Burke, “Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction,” in

Calderwood and Toliver, Essays, 530–47, see esp. Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquenceand English Renaissance Literature (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 19–24.




Where he should find you lions finds you hares,Where foxes, geese: you are no surer, no,Than is the coal of fire upon the iceOr hailstone in the sun.

(1.1.164–71)

Unlike Leontes’ passionate and nearly incoherent rants, such vituper-ation scarcely seems illogical but, as Joyce Van Dyke observes, is sed-ulously governed throughout by parallelism and relentless antitheses,the dominant rhetorical figure of the play.20 Is Martius incapable ofcommunicating with his plebeian audience? Or is he simply uninter-ested in doing so, insofar as his words really presuppose an imaginaryaudience of senators? The opening scene leaves the question open.That Martius does not share Menenius’s goal of persuasion in thisscene does not mean that he cannot be persuasive when he chooses.

Indeed, Shakespeare promptly drives this fact home in the battle-field scenes at Corioles. When the Romans at first are beaten back totheir trenches, “Enter . . . Martius cursing,” in the best top-sergeant tra-dition. Yet his blistering denunciations stir no one to follow him whenhe enters the gates alone and is shut in. (Interestingly, Plutarch doescredit Martius with inspiring a few men to follow him.) After person-ally standing off the city and bringing about its capture, he then rushesto the other sector of the battlefield where Cominius is engaged andbegs to be deployed against Aufidius in three short speeches that areall too commonly neglected in interpretations of the play:

I do beseech youBy all the battles wherein we have fought,By th’ blood we have shed together,By th’ vows we have madeTo endure friends, that you directly set meAgainst Aufidius and his Antiates,And that you not delay the present, but,Filling the air with swords advanced and darts,We prove this very hour.

(1.6.55–63)

Believing that Martius is almost constitutionally incapable of askingfor favors, Fish describes this speech as a request so phrased as to con-stitute a virtual command, leaving Cominius no alternative. Nothingcould be further from the mark, for here Shakespeare is determinedto make clear that Martius is perfectly capable of courteous persua-

20. Van Dyke, “Making a Scene,” 137.




sion when he chooses. His curses are the obverse of prayers, andthroughout the play he often expresses desire by praying; indeed, asLars Engle remarks, “Prayer for Coriolanus has a proto-Protestantprivacy.”21 Although the context of this speech is one of haste andmilitary urgency, the hero is willing enough to “delay the present” tocouch his request in the form of a mildly convoluted periodic utter-ance, where the burden of his request is artificially postponed untilthe fifth line of his speech. Coriolanus beseeches Cominius by intro-ducing his request with a formally structured tricolon, for like Mene-nius he has been schooled in the value of rhetorical retardation.

Of course, the preference for syntactic triads is a hallmark of rhe-torical discourse, familiar to us from such passages as Lincoln’s Gettys-burg appeal for “government of the people, by the people, for thepeople.” Like their classical predecessors, Renaissance rhetoricianswere fully aware that triadic amplification was central to oratory. “Thepractice of it will bring you to abundance of phrases, without whichyou shall never have choice, the mother of perfection,” John Hoskinsassured would-be orators in his Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1599).“Cicero in his orations useth it oft. Some others follow it to fourclauses, but he seldom exceedeth three.”22 In this key speech andothers, the hero’s use of the tricolon is charged with symbolic signif-icance, for it demonstrates his ability and willingness to employthe forms of oratorical discourse in communicating with his fellowRomans.

Against Cominius’s judgment, Martius persuades him to grant therequest for troops. “Take your choice of those / That best can aid youraction,” the general assents. Martius then turns to the troops:

Those are theyThat most are willing. If any such be here—As it were sin to doubt—that love this paintingWherein you see me smear’d; if any fearLesser his person than an ill report;If any think brave death outweighs bad life,And that his country’s 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 ChicagoPress, 1993), 177.

22. John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1935), 25. In his periodic utterances, Coriolanus exemplifies the dom-inant tendencies of Shakespeare’s style as a whole; see Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and theLanguage of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 46–48.




[He waves his sword.] They all shout and wave their swords, take himup 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 youBut is four Volsces? None of you but isAble to bear against the great AufidiusA shield as hard as his. A certain number—Though thanks to all—must I select from all.The rest shall bear the business in some other fightAs cause will be obeyed. Please you to march,And I shall quickly draw out my command,Which men are best inclin’d.

(1.6.67–86)

“His charisma wins not only admiration but service,” is the commentof one critic on this scene.23 But it is less his personal charisma thanhis rhetorical power that wins the troops, for if Roman idiom de-scribes fighting as an army’s form of speech, it also reveres speech asa mode of fighting; indeed, eloquence and armies are almost synony-mous, for in the Latin plural the rhetorical virtue of copia denotestroops, copiae.24 Here Coriolanus addresses the commoners again inthe copious language of oratory. The chief index of his formal elo-quence is the periodic tricolon composed of three if clauses that in-troduces his appeal for volunteers. Whereas his cursing before thegates of Corioles was ineffective, this rhetorical appeal generates morefollowers than he can use, moving them to eager emulation of thehero’s derring-do in single combat. The contrast is dramatic. Rhetoricis here linked with moral generosity—“As it were sin to doubt”—andeven with politeness that is rather startling in a military context—“Pleaseyou to march.” Note especially the elaborately foresighted courtesy of“A certain number— / Though thanks to all—must I select,” with whichMartius thoughtfully envisions the possibility that the selection pro-cess may hurt some feelings and seeks to prevent his necessary choicefrom being interpreted as an insult to anyone.

The lesson of this passage could hardly be more pointed. Shake-speare’s Martius does not lack the eloquent tongue that Plutarch giveshim. When he speaks with rhetorical calculation and appeals to thepeople generously, they respond to such an appeal with generosity of

23. Thomas Clayton, “ ‘So our virtues lie in th’interpretation of the time’: Shake-speare’s Tragic Coriolanus and Coriolanus, and Some Questions of Value,” Ben JonsonJournal 1 (1994): 162.

24. See 1.4.4 and Philip Brockbank, ed., Coriolanus (London: Methuen, 1976), 1.4.4;also Rhodes, Power, 48.




their own. Indeed, Shakespeare invents this entire episode (for whichthere is little precedent in Plutarch) specifically to dramatize Martius’soratorical power to persuade the people to unanimous consent if hechooses. The closest Plutarch comes is another scene where “Martiustaking his friends and followers with him and such as he could byfayer wordes intreate to goe with him, dyd ronne certen forreyes intothe dominion of the Antiates.”25

As one study has argued, “It is possible to simulate the oratoricalperiod by constructing sentences where one or two group beta clausesare attached to the initial constituents of the main clause in order tooffset the weight of several beta clauses attached to the final constitu-ents of the main clause. These left-branching sentences produce theeffect of roundness even when the number and the position of theconstituents are not so perfectly balanced around a centrally locatedmain clause.” Such left-branching sentences are notably more numer-ous in Antony and Cleopatra than in Richard II, and “the increase seemsto be associated with Shakespeare’s attempts to imitate the roundstructure of the oratorical period and thus to create a Roman style.”26

Anne Barton likewise contrasts Coriolanus to Richard II, arguingthat whereas Richard is the lonely champion of words, the later play“presents a Roman world of rhetoric and persuasion in which thehero alone resists the value placed on verbal formulations.”27 As theplay progresses, it is easy enough to find instances of Coriolanus’sdistrust of language. But it is also easy to isolate them from other ele-ments in his character and thus distort them. Coriolanus consistentlyadmires speech that is validated by action. But this may not presupposea rigid antithesis between them, for the need for appropriate actionwas a Roman rhetorical commonplace echoed throughout Renaissancehandbooks like Thomas Wilson’s: “Tullie saith well. The gesture ofman is the speache of his bodie.”28 As Volumnia says, “Action is elo-quence” (3.2.78), and her son is on occasion quite capable of believ-ing the converse. He resents flattery because it seems to subordinate

25. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 5:517. Among the few to note the sig-nificance of this scene is M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Back-ground (1910; reprint, New York: Russell, 1967), 528; his painstaking account of howShakespeare rendered the Roman social background is too commonly neglected ininterpretations of the play.

26. Dolores M. Burton, Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style: A Computer-Assisted Analysisof “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.




deeds to words and scorns the voices of the people because the lan-guage of the mob is by definition mobile, unstable, changeable. But iftheir words mutate alarmingly, he wants to believe that his own neednot. When they revoke their fickle consent to his consulship, he vehe-mently resists his fellow senators, who argue, “No more words, we be-seech 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 lungsCoin words till their decay, against those measlesWhich we disdain should tetter us, yet soughtThe very way to catch them.

(3.1.78–83)

This is not the response of a taciturn man but of an outspoken one,whose watchword is sincerity. Like Pierre de la Primaudaye in Bowes’stranslation of The French Academie (1594), he apparently believes that“if there shoulde be discorde between the heart, the tongue, and thespeach, the harmony could not be good. . . . Therefore they [the lungs]are lodged next to the heart, so that they couer it, to this end thatmen should be admonished, that their voyce and their speach is themessenger of their heart.”29 Among his fellow senators he speaks freelyand forthrightly. As Menenius says, “His heart’s his mouth. / What hisbreast forges, that his tongue must vent” (3.1.259–60). Presumably hewould agree with old Cato’s succinct definition of an orator as simplyvir bonus, dicendi peritus.

In Cicero’s De oratore the pristine ideal of republican rhetoric remainsthe backdrop for his treatment of the orator, and the dialogue formkeeps issues open. Thus when Crassus argues that the actor Roscius isthe model for oratory, Antonius disagrees that public speaking is aform of acting. Crassus’s veneration of technique risks the charge ofinsincerity, as Crassus himself confesses with arch embarrassment.Cicero presents Crassus as both an accomplished orator and a Romangentleman of the old school not so far removed from Coriolanus inspirit as the distance between early and late republican Rome mightsuggest. Though four centuries have made electioneering more cus-tomary, Coriolanus’s shamefaced reluctance in soliciting the votes heso grudgingly asks for remains reflected in this later senator’s embar-rassment about stump speaking: “When in quest of an office, I used

29. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The Second Part of the French Academie, trans. T. Bowes(London, 1594), cited by Hoskins’s modern editor Hudson in his Notes section follow-ing the text of Hoskyns’s Directions (55–56). See Jay Halio, “Coriolanus: Shakespeare’sDrama of Reconciliation,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970): 295.

One Line Long




in canvassing to send Scaevola away from me, explaining to him thatI 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 ourfriend here”—Scaevola is one of the personages in the dialogue—“wasof all men the one in whose presence I was least willing to appearsilly. Yet he it is whom on the present occasion Fate has appointed tobe an eye-witness and observer of my silliness. For what is sillier thanto talk about talking, since talking in itself is ever a silly business, ex-cept when it is indispensable.”30

Like that of Cicero’s Crassus, Coriolanus’s reluctance to engage inelectioneering rhetoric is neither freakish perversity nor general inar-ticulateness but an expression of Roman virtus. The tribunes repre-sent the modern conception of politics as preoccupied with choicesbetween issues and interests obtruding upon an older conception—still informing Parliamentary selection in Stuart England to a consid-erable extent—that elections were community rituals serving to bindleaders and people together unanimously through reciprocal exchangeof honor, with the emphasis on popular assent rather than consent.31

Just because Coriolanus feels awkward in that specialized oratoricalcontext we should not conclude that Shakespeare regards him as nospeaker whatsoever. Indeed, his subversion through voice and gestureof the humble formulas that he mouths to the people is itself a dis-play of rhetorical finesse, for like most classical and Renaissance rhet-oricians Henry Peacham sees irony as an aspect of skilled delivery,“when our meaning is contrary to our saying, not so well perceauedby the wordes, as eyther by the pronunciation, by the behauyour ofthe person, or by the nature of the thing.”32 Though Engle claims that“a completely noble world would be inimical to irony,” Shakespearedramatizes irony as part of Menenius’s aristocratic hauteur, and the“sardonic, laconic . . . sense of humor” that Wilbur Sanders justly notesin Coriolanus embraces such cultivated irony comfortably enough with-out 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 textby book, chapter, and line number.

31. See esp. Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice inEarly Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–9; see also D. J. Gordon,“Name and Fame: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays andLectures, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 203–19.

32. Henry Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (1577), quoted in Jane Donawerth, Shake-speare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1983), 77.

33. With Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 195, cf. Wilbur Sanders and HowardJacobson, Shakespeare’s Magnanimity: Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1978), 141.




Cicero’s Antonius distinguishes two kinds of oration in a way thatoffers a useful perspective on the play’s dramatization of rhetoric.The suasio—an advisory speech to the Senate—requires relatively littlerhetorical apparatus. The contio, however, is addressed to a publicassembly and is of all forms of oratory the closest to theater: maximaquasi oratoris scaena (De oratore 2.82.333–38). Although conciliation ofa mass audience should pervade the entire speech (2.79.322), a care-fully calculated exordium is especially necessary to win their good-will (2.19.80). The exordium should seldom be vehemens et pugnax(2.78.317), however vehement and aggressive the orator himself maybe, so to that extent rhetorical form demands a certain indirectnessof the speaker addressing a mixed public body whose goodwill cannotbe presumed, like the Senate’s, but must be won (2.43.182).

These Ciceronian issues and distinctions are very germane to Cor-iolanus. Perhaps the best way to gauge Shakespeare’s hero as a speakeris not to treat him as utterly incapable of communication, but ratherto see him as excelling at some kinds of Roman rhetoric, though notat others. The first three acts of the play present Coriolanus as farfrom an isolated figure. Instead he is dramatized in a web of familyand social relationships that bind him to Rome as the supreme exem-plar of the patrician class. As he embraces his general on the battle-field, so he clasps the hands of his wife and mother on his return—wesee a man bound to Rome by intimate physical ties that condition hishabits of speech. The play is full of legal language, for as an officerand a legislator Coriolanus is at home with both legal and grammati-cal performative utterances.34 Sicinius’s threat, “It is a mind / That shallremain a poison where it is, / Not poison any further,” draws the fol-lowing aggrieved response: “ ‘Shall remain?’ / Hear you this Triton ofthe minnows? Mark you / His absolute ‘shall’?” (3.1.88–92). The misuseof shall that launches Coriolanus into his angry speech to the Senatesuggests that he is not indifferent to verbal forms. Cominius agrees,“’Twas from the canon.”35 In the lengthy address that ensues, Cor-iolanus is vehemently defending the canons of Roman political customand aggressively exemplifying the stylistic canons of the suasio. Ignor-ing 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): 231–38.

35. Philip Brockbank’s judicious gloss on this passage (200) has obviously been mis-understood by Bryan Reynolds when he perversely argues that here Cominius is agree-ing with Sicinius rather than with Coriolanus, in “ ‘What Is the City But the People?’:Transversal Performance and Radical Politics,” in his Performing Transversally: ReimaginingShakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 100–101.




whom his standing is assured. To solicit their favor would be unneces-sary and even faintly insulting, denying their intimacy. He can beginhis seventy lines of impassioned argument with no more exordiumthan to say, “O good but most unwise patricians, why, / You grave butreckless senators, have you thus / Given Hydra here to choose anofficer” (3.1.93–95). Menenius, too, is capable of such uncomplimen-tary straightforwardness, but in addressing the plebeians in the open-ing scene he reserves his criticisms until a tactful exordium and thelengthy fable of the belly have put him in a position to squelch theringleader with an eminently aristocratic insult.

When Brutus interrupts the critique of popular government toask, “Why should the people give / One that speaks thus their voice?”Coriolanus’s response is characteristic: “I’ll give my reasons / Moreworthier than their voices” (3.1.120–22). Shunning rhetorical ornamen-tation, his speech is essentially impassioned reasoning. There are fewmetaphors and little obvious poetry; the speaker oscillates betweencrisply concrete diction and the abstract terminology of moral andpolitical analysis. But the result is scarcely the lifeless scholastic formal-ity of Brutus’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar.36 The orator is carriedforward by the logic of his argument, reinforced by syntactic parallel-ism and almost invariable enjambment. Punctuated by imperativesand self-answered questions, the speech is urgent and powerful. Sur-veying all Shakespeare’s formal orations, Kennedy characterizes it asfollows: “Impassioned as the speech becomes because of the earnest-ness and decision of the orator, the speaker never loses sight of thefact that his purpose is to make an intellectual, not an emotionalappeal. Under analysis, therefore, the speech reveals articulate organicstructure; but so spontaneous and sincere and convincing is the rhet-oric of the orator that the inner mechanics of the structure and thefunctioning of the parts of speech never obtrude to detract from theartistic effect of the oration as a whole. The speech fails to achieve itspurpose, but its failure is a glorious failure from the standpoint ofrhetorical art.”37

Its most evidently artful section is the peroration, where Coriolanusconcludes his argument with a periodic tricolon climaxing in a lengthy

36. On Brutus’s rhetoric, see esp. Maria Wickert, “Antikes Gedankengut in Coriolanus,”Shakespeare Jahrbuch 82/83 (1948): 11–24.

37. Kennedy, Oration, 108. By contrast, Houston’s rhetorical analysis of this speech(Shakespearean Sentences, 172) overstresses its supposedly passionate derangements ofnormal language, while in its logical rigor it seems a cardinal exception to Paul A.Cantor’s view in Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1976), 113–16, that Coriolanus’s Roman rhetoric is primarily the art of convey-ing preconceived truths rather than discovering truth.




compound predicate, once again a stylistic hallmark meant to attestto his command of formal eloquence:

Purpose so barred, it followsNothing is done to purpose. Therefore beseech you—You that will be less fearful than discreet,That love the fundamental part of stateMore than you doubt the change on’t, that preferA noble life before a long, and wishTo jump a body with a dangerous physicThat’s sure of death without it—at once pluck outThe multitudinous tongue; let them not lickThe sweet which is their poison.

(3.1.150–59)

Though some modern critics seem unaware of the technical sense inwhich “action is eloquence” (3.2.78), this speaker scarcely needs hismother’s later reminder to that effect.38 He evidently begins hisperoration with a rhetorical gesture indicating the two tribunes whophysically bar his progress. According to Abraham Fraunce’s ArcadianRhetorike (1588), such “casting out of the right arme is as it were anarming of the speach, and becommeth continued and flowing sen-tences, where verie speach it selfe seemeth to powre forth it self withthe stretching out of the arme.”39 One seventeenth-century emblembook depicts a conventionally allegorized hand of God reaching downfrom a cloud and grasping an unruly dismembered tongue that it hasevidently plucked out.40 Suffused with a lordly disdain for popularbut misleading sweets of the tongue, Coriolanus’s embodied speechis “a model of deliberative rhetoric” according to Kennedy, and, in-deed, probably Shakespeare’s finest oration in that vein.

How so many critics in recent decades have contrived to ignore thatjudgment is an interesting question in its own right. The Coriolanuswho addresses his fellow senators in this scene is not a complete iso-lato. When Sicinius promptly calls him a traitor, he responds, “Thouwretch, despite o’erwhelm thee!” (3.1.165). The scorn that he calls

38. For example, Dennis Bathory, “ ‘With himself at war’: Shakespeare’s RomanHero and the Republican Tradition,” in Shakespeare’s Political Pageant: Essays in Litera-ture and Politics, ed. Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little-field, 1996), 249. On the importance of such implicit gestures in Shakespeare, see DavidBevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Har-vard 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 Lan-guage Studies 28 (1998): 113n.




down upon the tribune is an explicitly social sanction. Confiding inaristocratic contempt, he dismisses Sicinius as almost unworthy ofnotice and once again attempts to rally support among the senatorsfor his political counterrevolution. Only after his mother and his col-leagues urge him to return to the marketplace and placate the peoplewith fair speech (which they frankly define as acting a feigned role)does he irrevocably equate speech with playing a part and recoil fromit as insincerity. Charged as a traitor for the second time, he explodes,“The fires i’th’ lowest hell fold in the people!” With his confidence insocial sanctions sapped by the “lying tongue” of an “injurious tribune”whose insult goes unchallenged by his friends, the man who could notabide to hear his nothings monstered becomes the self-styled “lonelydragon” who grandly proclaims, “I banish you!” (3.3.68–124).

Yet even at his most solipsistic, when he visits Antium to offer hisservice to his former enemies, he retains enough integrity to makehim almost ipso facto a persuasive speaker. A speech of thirty-fivelines explaining his mission to Aufidius draws this response from hismortal enemy: “O Martius, Martius! / Each word thou hast spokehath weeded from my heart / A root of ancient envy. If Jupiter /Should from yon cloud speak divine things / And say ‘’Tis true’, I’dnot believe them more / Than thee, all-noble Martius” (4.5.102–7).Aufidius’s magnanimity here, which has little precedent in North’s Plu-tarch, is specifically dramatized by Shakespeare as a noble responseto the eloquent frankness of Coriolanus’s speech—not as the prudentcalculation of a strange political bedfellow. In the Aristotelian rhetori-cal terminology with which Shakespeare was almost certainly familiar,this appeal converts Aufidius by addressing his ethos even more thanhis logos or pathos, making him admire the character of his hated rival.That is surely no mean oratorical feat. Coriolanus is still quite capableof using language persuasively when he imagines himself as one he-roic soul appealing to others.

Indeed, Coriolanus seems such an eloquent speaker to Aufidiusthat 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 significantly adds,“the Commoners being with him.” So far are the conspirators from think-ing Coriolanus an ineffective orator that they urge Aufidius 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 pronounc’d shallbury / His reasons with his body” (5.6.55–59). They imply that Aufidiusis as unable to defeat Coriolanus in a fair debate as on the field of battle.

To concede Coriolanus’s impressive eloquence is not to deny the de-fects revealed through his habits of speech. The vituperative energy




that powers his initial invective underlies almost all his speeches, eventhe most persuasive. In him aristocratic brusqueness seems a constantverbal assault on shams fancied and real. The anger that drives an epichero like Achilles also drives Coriolanus to epic feats in a militaryworld where an army may “speak” by giving battle: “They lie in view,but have not spoke as yet” (1.4.4). But his anger’s monotonous expres-sion in words becomes almost as wearisome in this play as Achilles’single-minded wrath on the battlefield of Troy. In Aristotelian terms,the heroic ethos to which Coriolanus insistently addresses himself isexcessively narrow; he lacks Homer’s and Aristotle’s awareness ofAchilles’ shield. It colors even his masculine predilection for reasoneddiscourse as opposed to flamboyant and potentially effeminate emo-tionalism, for the ratio in oratio. Whereas rhetorical argument tendsto deal in probabilities, Coriolanus aspires to absolute certainty. In TheBlazon of Gentrie (1586), John Ferne could prefer the blandishmentsof rhetoric to logic’s rigor because “Logicke will with violence extort”its rational conclusions.41 Likewise, in Cicero’s De oratore logic is com-pared to a closed fist whereas rhetoric figures as an invitingly openhand.42 In the De copia, Erasmus was only one of several Renaissancerhetoricians who echoed Quintillian’s specific example in recommend-ing a Ciceronian approach to amplifying a bare idea invitingly withgraphic and emotive evidentia: “If someone should say that a city wascaptured, he doubtless comprehends in that general statement every-thing that attends such fortune, but if you develop what is implicit inthe one word, flames will appear pouring through houses and temples;the crash of falling buildings will be heard . . . there will be the wailingof infants and women, old people cruelly preserved by fate till thatday . . . and the mother struggling to keep her infant.”43 But whereas,like a good Ciceronian, Volumnia counters her son’s abstract notionof a new name forged by burning Rome with copious, openhandedexemplification of the consequences, Coriolanus, habituated to a rhet-oric of “colder reasons” (5.3.287), could only rebut her in terms akinto striking her with his fist. In his austere intellectual devotion to a

41. John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (1586; reprinted in Proquest: Early English BooksOnline), 45. On the traditional equation between highly ornamental rhetoric and effem-inacy, see Christy Dermet, “Speaking Sensibly: Feminine Rhetoric in Measure for Mea-sure and All’s Well That Ends Well,” Renaissance Papers 1986, ed. Dale B. J. Randall andJoseph A. Porter (Columbia, SC: Southeast Renaissance Conference, 1986), 43–51.

42. The trope can be traced back to Varro and was echoed by Cassiodorus amonglater rhetoricians; see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin MiddleAges, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 450.

43. Quoted in Trousdale, Shakespeare, 47–48; John Hoskins, Directions, 22–23, likewiseborrows the same rhetorical exemplum of a captured city from Quintillian 8.3.67–69.




more logical approach to oratory, Coriolanus resembles not so mucha Roman Rambo as a Roman Ramist, a pre-Christian Puritan.

Yet he remains rooted in the republic that produced Cicero. Withthe Elizabethan Ciceronian Roger Ascham he might cry, “Ye know notwhat hurt ye do to learning, that . . . make a deuorse betwixt the tongand the hart.”44 Coriolanus is often criticized for ignoring the socialmorality expounded in Menenius’s fable of the belly: the need for or-ganic unity among all the members of the commonwealth, which wasexpounded by Edward Forset in A Comparative Discourse of the BodiesNatural and Politique (1606). But Coriolanus violates the metaphoricalclaims of the social organism mainly to defend his bodily and psychicunity. His equations between speech and physical action, his pro-found fear that hypocritical posing will emasculate him by forcinghim to assume a “harlot’s spirit” (3.2.114), reflect a man for whomword and deed, body and soul, are fused in an extraordinary sense ofpersonal integrity. Criticism unsympathetic to Coriolanus does not al-ways explain convincingly why an audience should reject this heroicindividual’s struggle for psychological and physiological coherencewhile accepting a morality of social coherence justified by stridentlycorporeal analogies. Thus “recent historicist critics who have arguedfor a subversive left-wing intention in the play overstate their case.”45

In Cicero’s De oratore, Antonius inquires how much rhetorical abilityis needed to write history. “If he is to write as the Greeks have writ-ten,” answers Catulus, “a man of supreme ability is required; if thestandard is to be that of our own fellow-countrymen, no orator at allis 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 extolthemselves. After Aufidius has called him a “boy of tears,” such atti-tudes underlie Coriolanus’s penultimate speech:

Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and ladsStain all your edges on me. ‘Boy’! False hound,If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,That, like an eagle in a dovecote, IFluttered your Volscians in Corioles.Alone I did it, boy!

(5.6.112–17)

Coriolanus speaks with the faint contempt for rhetorical ornamenta-tion of a Roman of the old school like Catulus. Elizabethan spaniels

44. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cam-bridge University Press, 1904), 265.

45. Parker, ed., Coriolanus, “Introduction,” 46.




“flattered” their tails when fawning, as Brockbank notes; the folio read-ing flattered might be retained as an intentional ambiguity permittedby the older conflation of flutter-flatter (308). The Roman who “wouldnot flatter Neptune for his trident” (3.1.258) seemed to the frustratedAufidius to have “watered his new plants with dews of flattery, / Se-ducing so my friends; and to this end / He bowed his nature, neverknown before / But to be rough, unswayable and free” (5.6.22–25).Grounded only in the Volscian leader’s embittered carping, this claimmay not be reliable. But whether or not Coriolanus flattered his ene-mies in both senses of the word, in our last sight of him he certainlyflatters himself, proudly reasserting the title that he once affected toscorn.

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 stonesmay break my bones / But names can never hurt me,” nor should theresponse of an African-American to the same insult suggest that thisreaction is necessarily immature.46 His eloquent self-laudation pro-vokes the Antiates to a violence that he almost welcomes. “But let itcome,” he had decided when determining not to remain in Rome withhis family after concluding peace (5.3.189). Like the later Roman heroRegulus, celebrated for honoring his word to his enemies by return-ing voluntarily to certain torture and execution in Carthage, Corio-lanus’s return to Antium is an act paradoxically imbued with theethos of his native city. Scarcely considering his Volscian audience aspolitical beings, he stands in his imagination before the bar of historyand seeks to vindicate himself with Roman forthrightness. UnlikeAchilles insulted by Agamemnon, his last words are those of a manrestraining himself with difficulty but wistfully determined to die amartyr to the law: “O that I had him, / With six Aufidiuses, or more,his tribe, / To use my lawful sword.”47

Plutarch’s “solitariness” may well tinge this speech. But since, likeKing James, before whom the play may initially have been performedat Blackfriars, Shakespeare sees less civic virtue in Rome than doesPlutarch, his hero’s social isolation is that much less a vice.48 Likewise,

46. In “Lesbian and Gay Taxonomies,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2002): 132, Alan Sinfieldlikewise situates Aufidius’s insult within the demeaning practice of calling ethnic others“boy” to deny their manly equivalence.

47. See Brower, Hero, 359–60, on 3.6.127–29; see further, 354–81, for an astutetreatment of the mingling of Homeric and Roman ideals in the play.

48. See Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court,1603–13 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 148; also cf. Parker, ed., Cor-iolanus, “Introduction,” 86–87.




Coriolanus’s shortcomings as an all-purpose speaker may not flawhim as deeply as critics suppose, for Shakespeare seems rather skep-tical of eloquence as a virtue.49 When not positively evil, suasion inShakespearean drama is generally futile or unfortunate in its results.Surprisingly few characters ever succeed in persuading others to vir-tuous courses of action. To stigmatize Coriolanus for not excellingShakespeare’s other orators in this respect seems unfair—especiallysince few modern statesmen have spoken more eloquently, while con-temporary politicians renowned for oratorical finesse have not alwaysproved the most respected and effective leaders.

If modern American culture remains conflicted over the value ofrhetoric, early modern England was no less so, as several recent stud-ies have emphasized. “Of the many commonplaces in the Elizabethandiscipline of language,” observes Jane Donawerth, “none stands un-contested.”50 While the early Renaissance invested high hopes in thecultivation of language as a way of exercising real power, there weremany nominalists and few realists. Despite all the free-floating Neo-platonic jargon, “the wide-spread continental interest in philosophicalword-magic finds no parallel in England.”51 But while most Eliza-bethans took for granted the artificiality of words and the radicaldisjunction between words and things, this seldom led to the decon-structionist view that words are mainly about words, for “only if bothare 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 citiesand whole countries?” asked Thomas Wilson.53 But the worth of thisenterprise was not always apparent to the owners of the castles thatmight succumb to the eloquent tongue battery. “It was requisite that

49. See esp. Brian Vickers, “The Power of Persuasion: Images of the Orator, Elyot toShakespeare,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of RenaissanceRhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 411–35;also his Shakespeare: “Coriolanus” (London: Arnold, 1976), and “Teaching Coriolanus:The Importance of Perspective,” in Teaching Shakespeare, ed. Walter Edens et al. (Prince-ton University Press, 1977), 228–70. Vickers’s interpretation of the play seems implau-sible in several respects: e.g., in viewing the hero as a modest man ruled by love and intreating all the play’s oratory as “evil eloquence.” But his sensitivity to rhetorical issuesencourages a healthy skepticism about other characters’ self-serving descriptions ofCoriolanus that lets us begin to recapture the tragic dimension of the drama. On thepolitical and moral biases that sway reactions to the hero, see also Houston, ShakespeareanSentences, 178.

50. Donawerth, Shakespeare, 4.51. Ibid., 40.52. Trousdale, Shakespeare, 162.53. Wilson, Arte, 5–6.




the excellente Capitaines were oratours,” claimed Machiavelli in TheArt of War—and that sent a shiver down many a Renaissance prince’sspine.54 Hand in hand with humanist reverence for orators command-ing the ear of absolutist power, one recent study demonstrates, therewas always fear of them as potential demagogues, tribunes, basebornoutsiders who might unsettle the status quo rather than consolidateit. While the seductive power of speech was often figured as feminine,leading to fears that “the rhetor may be emasculated by the art hepractices, turned into an effeminate man,” other Renaissance theoristsreacted by stressing “the violence of the orator’s penetration . . . ofhis listener’s soul” as a mode of “aggressive, phallic assault.”55 “O Am-bivalent Organ,” Erasmus apostrophized the tongue in De lingua (1525),worried by its potential destructiveness.56 The orator should be agood man, classical rhetoric stipulated. But was he always? Mercurythe god of eloquence was also the god of thieves.

The dawn of the seventeenth century in England saw increasingskepticism about language and its arts. “In the sixteenth century, itwas assumed that defects in men brought about confused speech; inthe seventeenth century, it became widely held that confused speechbrings on many of the defects in man.”57 Whereas the early Renais-sance celebrated language’s power to create common understanding,the seventeenth century wondered with Locke whether words simplyprojected one individual’s ideas and dreamed of inventing universallanguages to circumvent solipsism. Diminished confidence in languagecolors the Jacobean era. For Francis Bacon words were Idols of theMarketplace. Scriptural texts like Proverbs 18:21 and the perfervidapostolic denunciations of James 3:51–56 lie behind John Abernethy’sThe Poisonous Tongue (1622). In Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue andthe Five Senses for Superiority (1607), the university dramatist ThomasTomkis articulated the fear that by making “rhetoric wanton” thetongue was usurping bodily authority and jeopardizing social hierar-chy; his learned play was sufficiently popular to go through five Jac-obean editions.58 Stylistically, Ben Jonson favored Senecan tersenessover Marlovian amplitude, and his play Catiline (1611) dramatizesCicero’s triumph ambiguously, for Catiline’s “jibes that he is really

54. Quoted in Rhodes, Power, 39.55. Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance

Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 143, 148; see alsochaps. 1–2.

56. Quoted in Mazzio, “Sins,” 95.57. Margreta de Grazia, “Shakespeare’s View of Language,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29

(1978): 381.58. Quoted in Mazzio, “Sins,” 106.




just a ‘boasting, insolent tongue-man’ do not, in fact, sound limp” butreflect the decreasing respect for Elizabethan copia. As Neil Rhodesobserves, “the anti-rhetorical values of Catiline’s last speech are thoseof the future.”59

Indeed, with the gradual ascendancy of masques, those antirhetoricalvalues came to prevail in court drama far more than Jonson wished,for as Morris Croll first argued, skeptical anti-Ciceronianism was linkedto political absolutism.60 The popular stage that nurtured Shake-speare’s plays throve on a love of language in its audiences, for theElizabethan player was first and foremost a consummate rhetorician.In the “excellent actor,” claimed Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters(1615), “whatsoever is commendable to the grave Orator, is most ex-quisitly perfect.”61 But Inigo Jones’s proscenium framed a stage thatcultivated visual over verbal effects, turning hearers into spectatorsand subordinating poetry to scenery, as Jonson observed with dismay.Extolling the eloquent orator as “emonge all menne, not onelye to betaken for a singuler manne, but rather to be counted for halfe a God,”Thomas Wilson was less elitist than he might seem, for such perfervidRenaissance praise of rhetoric was grounded in the humanist assump-tion that anyone with talent (whether a Roman patrician or a glover’sson in Stratford) could learn the art.62 In the Nicomachean Ethics,

59. Rhodes, Power, 192–94.60. 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 Uni-versity Press, 1966), 3–233. In “Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Re-naissance England,” New Literary History 14 (1983): 597–621, Heinrich F. Plett modifiesCroll’s influential taxonomy by emphasizing that elaborately ornamental rhetoric waswell-adapted to foster court power, while in The Performance of Conviction: Plainness andRhetoric 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 werealso deployed to challenge political absolutism. But Croll’s thesis that Renaissance hos-tility to rhetoric was often linked to sympathy for authoritarian government remainspersuasive; indeed, Graham’s reading of Coriolanus relies heavily on it to paint anangry hero with a naive craving for verbal magic whose “antirhetorical desire to unitewords and deeds thus fosters an absolutist political stance” (185). However, Coriolanusis not Richard II. From our perspective, Graham’s interpretation overlooks that this re-publican senator commenced his political career by helping overthrow an authori-tarian monarch, that his speeches to fellow senators bear clear marks of rhetoricalorganization such as the tricolon, and that there is much to be said intellectually for hislogical rigor and morally for his passionate commitment to personal integrity. UnlikeGraham, we find the play lacking “neither shared criteria of truth nor dramatically jus-tified private convictions,” 186.

61. Quoted in B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1964), 5.

62. Wilson, Arte, 11.




Aristotle had toyed with the idea that by exemplifying superhumanexcellence on a heroic or divine scale a few men might be exemptfrom ethical rules and approach godhood. At times Coriolanus’sapparent “sovereignty of nature” (4.7.35) invites comparison withthis idea of innate, supramoral, transcendent heroic virtue. But bystressing the shaping influence of Roman culture and especially Vol-umnia’s role, Shakespeare’s play makes his preeminence seem learned,a matter of upbringing and social conditioning rather than uniqueheroic transcendence, owing more to nurture than to nature. As Eliz-abethan commoners could learn to be orators (or actors), so they mightaspire to make themselves into heroes—or, from the nervous perspec-tive of Stuart absolutism, republican rebels. Jacobean and Carolinecourt drama revolved around the glorification of a monarch de iuredivino whose excellence needed not so much to be demonstrated bydeeds or witnessed by words as revealed through ritual. In the masquesdevoted to the royal mystique, James never spoke or played a role(except as spectator), although he believed that “a King is as one seton a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gaz-ingly do behold.”63 The self-made professional actors with well-honedrhetorical skills were typically relegated to speaking roles in the anti-masques, portraying disreputable elements resisting governance, whilethe masquers embodying the aristocratic virtues displayed them lessin speech than in dance.

All this cultural ambivalence toward rhetoric forms the intellectualcontext of Coriolanus (ca. 1608?), just as the Midlands agricultural riotsform its political context. The play is essentially contemporary withthe De Laconismo (1609) of Puteanus, the disciple of Justus Lipsiusperhaps most committed to the stylistic campaign launched by hismaster and waged on many fronts against the excesses of RenaissanceCiceronianism. Many recent critics find political theory the play’s rai-son d’être, so if that is set aside, one of them claims, “nothing ofinterest, of plot or character, remains.”64 That conviction bespeaks afrighteningly narrow range of interest, for politics aside, extremelyintriguing issues about language remain. Coriolanus’s very real ora-torical powers dramatize Renaissance respect for persuasive or evenaggressive speech; significantly, his base opponents, the tribunes, areportrayed as privy intriguers rather than notable public speakers. ButCoriolanus’s considerable mistrust of language represents the other

63. Quoted in Stephen Orgel, “Making Greatness Familiar,” in Pageantry in the Shake-spearean 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.




strand in the contemporary discourse of rhetoric. Indeed, there isgood reason to suppose that Shakespeare shared the ambivalence ofhis age and was by no means unsympathetic to his hero’s reluctanceto acknowledge the power of words. “Shakespeare’s attitude towardthe oratio-ratio theorem had been tinged by skepticism early on,”argues Heinrich Plett. “This is evident in the eventual failure of thosefigures who stand for a rhetoric of social harmony—Brutus, MeneniusAgrippa, Othello. It becomes even more pronounced in Shakespeare’snew oratorical type—the anti-rhetorician.” If Coriolanus is to be viewedas an antirhetorician, that places him in distinguished moral company,for the other notable example of the type that Plett identifies in thelater canon is Cordelia, whose silence, like Virgilia’s, “signals neithermeekness nor submissiveness but, rather, a protest against a rhetoricof false semblance.”65 Even Coriolanus’s foe Aufidius notes that suchoratory diminishes power rather than enhances it: “Power, unto itselfmost commendable, / Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair / T’extolwhat it hath done” (4.7.51–53). To a self-evident truth, as another criticobserves, a gracious silence “is the only reliable sign of consent.”66

Coriolanus’s denunciations of language merely voice out loud whatmore taciturn and tactful antirhetoricians imply about its corruption.

To respond to Coriolanus’s final words as childish grandiloquence,a specimen of “tragical satire,” is to show a peevish lack of generosityto a protagonist who, however flawed, towers over everyone else inthe play. In a world dominated by ludicrously unstable opinions, andotherwise apparently devoid of the divine, Coriolanus’s “belief in aself-regarding noble ideal and in the special relationship of his nobilityto the gods comes to bear an enormous weight” as the sole alterna-tive source of value.67 He has a genuine grandeur that trendily politi-cized modern interpretations often ignore. As R. B. Parker notes ofrecent productions, “In our age of on-the-spot television, wide-screencinema, and the fear of global disaster, it is difficult for directors andactors to recreate an adequate sense of enthusiasm for Martius’ prow-ess as a warrior.”68 Less hostile to his political and heroic ethos thanare most contemporary academics, Shakespeare could view Coriolanuswith qualified admiration. His final speech sums up the paradoxical-ness 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,” 809–14.

67. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 191.68. Parker, ed., Coriolanus, “Introduction,” 110.




integrity than most human beings possess. “Admiration and contemptare both far too powerful to be denied; yet they refuse to coalesceinto a single sentiment,” Sanders justly observes, so to begrudge himadmiration where due is “to fall into that meanness of envy, of whichthere are many examples in the play.”69

Speech-act theory will teach us little about this play if we forget themore ancient theory of speeches embodied in classical rhetoric. Therehad always been a native tradition of terse, plainspoken Roman rhet-oric exemplified by Cato the Elder, and in the declining republic thisled to the movement known as Atticism, which stressed pure andsometimes even faintly archaic Latinity. In Brutus and Orator, Cicerocontrasts at some length his own more elaborate practice with sucheloquent advocates of “Attic” simplicity as Caesar, Calvus, and Brutus.All parties to the debate professed to admire Demosthenes, whomthe Roman Atticists pointed to as an alternative to Ciceronian stan-dards, and this controversy fed into the Renaissance anti-Ciceronians’views. Contrasting Cicero’s diffuse amplification with Demosthenes’terse vigor, the rhetorician Longinus could thus find “rugged sublim-ity” in the latter’s “violence, yes, and his speed, his force, his terrificpower of rhetoric . . . [like] a flash of lightning or a thunder-bolt. . . .Nervous force comes in his intensity and violent emotion, and in pas-sages where he has utterly to dumbfounder the audience.”70 We needto reawaken and expand our taste for rhetoric so that we can imaginethe valedictory words of Coriolanus as an example of what Longinusdescribes as the oratorical sublime, linking it less with Cicero thanwith Rome’s “Attic” school of orators (and by extension with theiranti-Ciceronian Renaissance counterparts). Like Regulus, this Romanhero sacrifices his immediate self-interest to score an equivocal moraltriumph over his enemies. The paucity of soliloquies in the play leadsmany to conclude that Coriolanus “is the least introspective of Shake-speare’s major tragic figures”—and therefore perhaps not even verytragic.71 But public language has its own potential for tension, for the

69. Sanders and Jacobson, Shakespeare’s Magnanimity, 145–46; see also Cantor, Shake-speare’s Rome, 94–98, on the value of Coriolanus’s struggle for integrity.

70. Longinus, On the Sublime, 12.4–5, ed. and trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, in Aristotle,The Poetics (London: Heinemann, 1927). Longinus’s distinction helps clarify Parker’ssense that Coriolanus’s “ ‘driven’ syntax contrasts strikingly with the Ciceronian full-ness in the public style of Menenius and the Tribunes and especially in the copiousloquacity of Volumnia” (Introduction, 75–76). On the controversy over Atticism re-flected in Cicero’s later works and Longinus, see George A. Kennedy, A New History ofClassical Rhetoric (Princeton University Press, 1994), 151–66, 191–92.

71. Stanley D. McKenzie, “ ‘Unshout the noise that banish’d Martius’: StructuralParadox and Dissembling in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Studies 18 (1996): 189. Contrast,




complex linguistic anxieties of an age may boil up within it. Whenthat happens in Coriolanus, what is dramatized in its hero is surely the“tormented and conflicted psyche” we associate with tragedy.72 Para-doxically, Jacobean anxiety about the sinister power of the tonguewas the hallmark of an era when the tongue was increasingly power-less as print culture proliferated, alienating linguistic representationfrom the body. Exemplifying both the power and the powerlessnessof the tongue, this play enacts not only the tragedy of its hero but thelarger tragedy of Renaissance rhetoric.

72. Kernan, Shakespeare, 144. For other cogent defenses of Coriolanus’s tragic stat-ure, see Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 191; Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 99–124; andSanders and Jacobson, Shakespeare’s Magnanimity, 186.

however, Sanders and Jacobson’s forceful rebuttal of such thinking, Shakespeare’s Mag-nanimity, 153: “Coriolanus’s silences—his moments of steadfastly not soliloquizing—maybe filled with something just as important as Hamlet’s loose-souled lucubrations. Thereare other forms of moral intelligence besides the sort that is perpetually proclaiming it-self. Some of them are rather attractive.”

