Themes in Coriolanus

Coriolanus has one way of being in the world: absolute. He is a soldier, and every part of him is organised around that fact. He speaks without tact, acts without calculation, and refuses to manage the impression he makes on anyone. His pride is not vanity — it is the refusal to separate performance from reality, to present one self in public and reserve another in private.

The play tests this relentlessly. To become consul — a political office he is entitled to by his military record — he must stand in the market-place in the "gown of humility" (a coarse garment worn traditionally by candidates seeking votes), show his wounds, and ask for the people's voices. He finds this humiliating to the point of being physically impossible.

His contempt for the people is genuine rather than tactical. "You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate / As reek o' the rotten fens" — this is Coriolanus after being formally banished, giving his assessment of the city that has just rejected him. He is not performing contempt. He has felt this way throughout. What changes in Act 3 Scene 3 is that the situation no longer requires him to conceal it.

His response to the banishment is the play's most concentrated statement of his identity: "I banish you." He reverses the syntax. He is not the one being cast out; Rome is casting itself away from him. "There is a world elsewhere." The line sounds brave. It is also lonely. He leaves alone.

His identity does not survive the alliance with Aufidius. When he is called "boy of tears" in Act 5 Scene 6, the insult is calculated precisely: it denies him both his age and his emotional control, reduces the military hero to a weeping child. He responds with fury. "Alone I did it. 'Boy'!" — trying to reassert everything the insult has taken, repeating the title that defines him. Aufidius has found the only word that can make Coriolanus act against his own interest.

The play's tragic logic is that a man whose identity is entirely contained in one quality cannot survive in a world that requires constant flexibility. Coriolanus is not wrong about himself. He is wrong about whether the world will accommodate what he is.

The play's final irony is that Aufidius, who beat Coriolanus to the provocation, is left holding the body of a man he called the greatest soldier he ever faced. He offers a soldier's funeral as a cover for the politics of what just happened. The ceremony is genuine. The murder that made it necessary was also genuine. Both things coexist at the end of the play.

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Coriolanus was written around 1608, roughly twenty years after the Enclosure Riots of the 1590s in the English Midlands, when people displaced by land enclosures rioted over food. The play opens with a Roman plebeian (working-class citizen) revolt over grain, and the tribune Sicinius's question in Act 3 Scene 1 — "What is the city but the people?" — is one of the most direct political statements in Shakespeare.

The plebeians in this play are neither heroes nor fools. They are hungry, inconsistent, easily influenced, and also capable of making legitimate political demands. They have tribunes — Sicinius and Brutus — who represent their interests with a mixture of genuine advocacy and cynical manipulation. The tribunes watch Coriolanus's consultation of the people in Act 2, and then, in Act 3, engineer the reversal of his consulship by provoking him into showing his contempt.

Coriolanus's contempt for the people is not simply personal prejudice. He has a theory: that giving the poor political power over the rich will undermine the social order that military success depends on. "He that trusts to you, / Where he should find you lions, finds you hares; / Where foxes, geese." He is talking about military courage, but his contempt extends to everything the people represent.

Menenius's fable of the belly in Act 1 Scene 1 — the story that the belly feeds all the body's members even though it appears to do nothing — is the patrician argument against democracy: the ruling class provides for the people even when the people cannot see it. It is a plausible argument presented by a charming man. The starving citizens point out that the belly keeps all the best food for itself.

The people vote for Coriolanus's banishment, then are shown to regret it. The tribunes manipulate the reversal. This is the play's most direct examination of popular politics: how it can be shaped by those who know how to use resentment as a tool. Sicinius and Brutus are not the people; they are managers of the people's emotion.

The play does not endorse Coriolanus's contempt or the tribunes' manipulation. It places both within a political structure — Rome's fragile republic — that is being strained by exactly the contradictions each side embodies. The city survives Coriolanus. Whether it learns anything from the experience is not the play's concern.

The city survives Coriolanus. Whether it learns anything from the experience is not the play's concern. What it demonstrates is that popular politics can be manipulated by those who know how to direct resentment, and that a man who cannot manage his contempt for the people is ungovernable by definition.

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Volumnia made Coriolanus. She says so explicitly in Act 1 Scene 3: she sent him to war young, celebrated his wounds as marks of honour, shaped his entire understanding of what a man is supposed to be. The pride that the play destroys him with — the absolute refusal to compromise, the inability to perform humility even strategically — is her creation.

She is not ashamed of this. She is proud of it. She describes hearing of Coriolanus's first wound from battle and feeling triumph rather than distress. She is producing a Roman soldier and a Roman man, and by the standards of Rome she has succeeded completely. He is everything she wanted.

But her ambition for him goes beyond the military. She wants him to be consul. In Act 3 Scene 2, when he has already lost the people's voices by showing his contempt, she pleads with him to go back and dissemble — to perform humility long enough to secure the political office. This is the moment her creation conflicts with itself: the absolute standard she built in him makes him unable to do the political thing she now needs him to do.

Her greatest scene is Act 5 Scene 3, the embassy to Coriolanus at the Volscian camp. He has marched on Rome with the Volscians; she comes with Virgilia and young Martius to beg him to stop. She speaks for over forty lines — argument after argument, each one carefully aimed at something she built in him. When she finishes, she kneels. He tells her she has won a happy victory for Rome and a son's undoing for herself.

"Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw, / And saving those that eye thee!" — this is how she describes him, an image that combines admiration with the most accurate map of why he will fail. He is a fixed point, unable to yield, and fixed points are destroyed by the tide rather than redirected by it.

The scene between them in Act 5 Scene 3 is the play's emotional centre. A mother who shaped her son into something magnificent and fatal, and a son who cannot save himself from what she made him, meeting across an impossible distance that her love created.

The scene between them in Act 5 Scene 3 is the play's emotional centre: a mother who shaped her son into something magnificent and fatal, and a son who cannot save himself from what she made him, meeting across a distance her love created and cannot now close.

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Coriolanus is brilliant at war and catastrophic at politics. This is not coincidental — the qualities that make him exceptional in battle are exactly the qualities that make him unsuitable for a republic. He cannot manage his contempt, cannot speak dishonestly, cannot tell people what they want to hear. These are all virtues in the field. They are liabilities in the forum.

His battlefield record is extraordinary. He storms the gates of Corioles alone in Act 1 Scene 4, re-emerges covered in blood, and immediately turns to the next fight. In Act 1 Scene 5 he refuses a share of the spoils as beneath him. His name — Coriolanus — is taken from the town he conquered. In military Rome, this is the greatest honour available. The play then spends four acts watching this honour fail to protect him from politics.

The tribunes understand something he does not: that in a republic, military glory is not sufficient. Power must be sought, maintained and managed through the political process. Sicinius and Brutus are mediocre men by any military measure. They are better politicians than Coriolanus, and in this play that is what determines who survives.

"You souls of geese, / That bear the shapes of men, how have you run / From slaves that apes would beat!" — this is Coriolanus to his own soldiers in Act 1 Scene 4, furious at their retreat. He treats his troops with the same contempt he treats the plebeians. His loyalty is to Rome as an abstract ideal; he cannot extend it to actual Romans.

His alliance with Aufidius — the Volscian general he has spent his career fighting — is the play's most radical political move. When Rome rejects him, he goes to his enemy and offers his service against the city that banished him. The offer is accepted. Two nations' best soldiers, united by the political failure of one of them.

The play does not make war itself the problem. It makes the incompatibility between the best qualities of a soldier and the best qualities of a democratic politician the problem. Rome needs both. It cannot find them in the same person. The choice between Coriolanus and the tribunes is a choice between two incomplete versions of what a city requires.

Rome needs both the soldier and the politician. It cannot find them in the same person. The choice between Coriolanus and the tribunes is a choice between two incomplete versions of what a city requires, and the play is clear that neither is sufficient on its own.

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Coriolanus defines himself entirely through Rome. His name is a Roman name, taken from a Roman conquest. His values are Roman values, shaped by Roman traditions. His mother is Roman, his wife is Roman, his son is Roman. When Rome banishes him in Act 3 Scene 3, it is not just removing him from a city; it is severing the only identity he has ever had.

His response — "I go alone, / Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen / Makes fear'd and talk'd of more than seen" — is the play's most honest statement of what exile means to him. The dragon's isolation is its power. He converts the expulsion into a kind of superiority. But "lonely" is the word the line turns on. He is alone.

His arrival at Aufidius's gate in Act 4 Scene 4 is staged with deliberate visual impact. He appears disguised, barely recognisable, asking for an enemy's help. He tells Aufidius he has no city anymore: "I am alone the villain of the earth." He offers his service against Rome, or his own death at Aufidius's hands. Both are acts of a man who no longer has anywhere to belong.

Aufidius's welcome is brief and intense. He speaks of dreaming of Coriolanus, of fighting him in fantasy. Their relationship — two great soldiers who have fought each other across their careers and never produced a decisive outcome — is the play's most emotionally charged bond, more vivid than anything Coriolanus shares with his wife or his son. It is based entirely on enmity. When enmity is replaced by alliance, neither man knows what to do with the other.

Volunia's embassy in Act 5 Scene 3 forces Coriolanus to choose between Rome and his new belonging among the Volscians. He cannot choose. He does what his mother asks, saves Rome, and then goes back to the Volscians knowing what awaits him. Aufidius has already decided he is a traitor. "The god of soldiers, thou boy of tears!" — the insult Aufidius uses to provoke him in Act 5 Scene 6 — lands because it denies him his identity as a soldier. Coriolanus dies defending that identity, which is the only home he ever had.

Coriolanus dies defending the only identity he ever had. Aufidius arranges it efficiently, using the one word — "boy" — that strips everything away at once. The play ends without ceremony. What is buried with him is the question of whether a city that cannot contain its best soldier deserves to survive.

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