<i>Coriolanus</i>: The Death of A Political Metaphor

Abstract

HAKESPEARE'S Coriolanus contains a sustained attempt to impose the analogy of the body politic on a political situation. The attempt fails. In a play for the public stage, and therefore likely representative of current thinking, a centuries-old commonplace proves to be ineffective. The initial difficulty in approaching Coriolanus has been deciding whether the play is essentially political-perhaps a demonstration of the need for civic order-or personal-the exhibition of the fall of a noble but deeply flawed hero. The play is both-first one, then the other. The first three acts are dominated by the bustle Dr. Johnson noticed-insurrection, war, election, trial, banishment. The last acts then work out the fate of Coriolanus in terms of his intimate relationship with his mother and, secondarily, Aufidius. Both public and private concerns are present throughout the play; the point is that the balance, the emphasis, changes significantly after the protagonist leaves Rome. The public activity is reenforced by images of a body diseased and healthy, ordered and chaotic. The language of the body politic is concentrated in Act I, scene i-where Shakespeare substantially, but not exclusively, follows Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch-and in Act III, scene i, where he develops a pattern of imagery for which there is no precedent in his primary source. The play begins with the plebeians' riot and Menenius Agrippa's fable of the belly and the rebellious members.' As M. W. MacCallum notices, Shakespeare compresses history so that a distinct and dignified secession to the Mons Sacer is coarsened and juxtaposed to the career of Coriolanus.2 Menenius' fable thereby establishes a conventional metaphor and its equally conventional, conservative application as a potential reference point for the action of the play. The play might become an exemplum against disobedience, a dramatization of the necessity of stability, order, and degree.8 Shakespeare's Menenius is both livelier and longer-winded than his original in North: