Coriolanus

Overview

About three hundred and thirty pages, Shakespeare’s tragedy, written around 1608. Caius Martius, a Roman patrician and unmatched soldier, wins the surname Coriolanus by taking the Volscian city of Corioli almost single-handed. Put forward for consul, he cannot bring himself to flatter the common people whose votes he needs.

The tribunes provoke him into contempt that gets him banished. He joins his old enemy Aufidius and leads the Volscians against Rome. At the gates his mother Volumnia persuades him to spare the city; the Volscians kill him for it.

What happens

The taking of Corioli. Caius Martius takes the Volscian city of Corioli almost single-handed, an extraordinary feat of individual martial heroism that earns him the honorific surname Coriolanus and establishes his considerable military reputation.

Standing for consul. Coriolanus is put forward for consul, requiring him to seek the common people’s votes, a democratic requirement his temperament finds genuinely difficult and beneath what he considers his proper dignity.

Refusing to flatter the people. Coriolanus cannot bring himself to flatter the common people whose votes he actually needs, his unbending integrity becoming a genuine political liability once Rome requires performed persuasion rather than martial action.

The tribunes’ provocation. The tribunes, sensing Coriolanus’s vulnerability, provoke him into open contempt for the common people, a calculated manipulation that succeeds in getting him formally banished from Rome.

Joining Aufidius against Rome. Banished, Coriolanus joins his old enemy Aufidius and leads the Volscian army against Rome, personal grievance against the city that rejected him overriding whatever loyalty his service there might otherwise command.

Volumnia’s persuasion and his death. At the gates of Rome, his mother Volumnia persuades him to spare the city; he complies, and the Volscians subsequently kill him for this act of mercy toward his former homeland.

How to read it

Read Coriolanus’s inability to flatter the common people whose votes he actually needs as staging a genuine incompatibility between martial and political virtue, the unbending integrity that made him unmatched in battle becoming fatal liability in civic life.

Pay close attention to how the tribunes’ calculated provocation into contempt demonstrates how skilled political operators can weaponize a genuinely admirable but socially rigid temperament against itself, exploiting exactly the honesty that dooms him.

Notice how his alliance with Aufidius against Rome stages betrayal’s genuine complexity, personal grievance against the city that rejected him overriding whatever patriotic loyalty his considerable prior military service there might otherwise have commanded.

Consider how Volumnia’s persuasion of her son to spare Rome, and the Volscians’ subsequent killing of him for that mercy, completes the play’s devastating final irony, the maternal bond shaping his entire character ultimately producing his own death.

Read this tragedy alongside Shakespeare’s own Julius Caesar to compare two Roman political tragedies, one centered on a soldier temperamentally unsuited to democratic persuasion, the other on a leader whose very popularity with the people proves genuinely dangerous to Rome’s republican institutions.

Questions it raises

• Does Coriolanus’s refusal to flatter the common people represent admirable integrity, or does the play ultimately suggest this rigidity constitutes a genuine political failing, an inability to perform the persuasion legitimate democratic leadership actually requires?
• How does the tribunes’ calculated manipulation of Coriolanus’s temperament shape your understanding of Roman political institutions more broadly? Does the play suggest these tribunes represent legitimate popular interest, or cynical manipulation of democratic process for personal power?
• What does Coriolanus’s alliance with his former enemy Aufidius against Rome suggest about the relationship between personal grievance and political loyalty? Does the play present this betrayal as comprehensible response to genuine injustice, or as fundamentally unforgivable treachery?
• How should a reader weigh Volumnia’s influence over her son throughout the play? Does her final persuasion represent genuine maternal love saving Rome, or does it complete a pattern of maternal control that had already shaped Coriolanus’s destructive rigidity from childhood?
• Given that sparing Rome directly causes Coriolanus’s own death at Volscian hands, what does this outcome suggest about the play’s ultimate judgment on mercy and political compromise? Does clemency prove genuinely virtuous here, or catastrophically self-destructive?
• What does this play’s relatively unusual political focus, avoiding both romantic subplot and supernatural elements common in Shakespeare’s other tragedies, suggest about his late-career interest in exploring power, class and civic virtue with unusual directness?