Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  In that's no changeling. ..

  —Act IV, scene vii, lines 8-11

  And yet he must be used, for he is conquering Rome without even having to fight. Aufidius says:

  All places yield to him ere he sits down,

  And the nobility of Rome are his;

  The senators and patricians love him too.

  —Act IV, scene vii, lines 28-30

  Apparently, even though the patricians of Rome have agreed to resist, there remain some who cling more tightly to party than to country. And even those who are intending to resist can do so with only half a heart.

  And yet can the patricians honestly think that the Volscians are willing to serve as nothing more than a bunch of errand boys for them, to help them back to power out of love and kindness? The outside power, brought in to help in an internal fight, stays (all history shows) to help itself at the expense of all. And Aufidius says, at the end of the scene, apostrophizing the absent Coriolanus (to whom he refers by the familiar first name as though the man is someone he can now consider a tool or servant):

  When, Caius, Rome is thine,

  Thou art poor'st of all; then shortly art thou mine

  —Act IV, scene vii, lines 56-57

  The patricians who decide to resist Coriolanus may be moved by abstract love of country, but they may also be moved by a realization of the danger of accepting foreign help under any circumstances. This is something the Greeks never learned (and few nations since).

  … one poor grain or two …

  Soon Rome knows the worst. It is Coriolanus' vengeful desire to burn it to the ground. Surrender will not satisfy him; only destruction will. (This is purely psychotic unless the patricians had specifically deserted Coriolanus in the scene I postulate to be missing.)

  Cominius, the ex-consul, and Coriolanus' old general, had gone to plead and had been met coldly. Cominius had reminded Coriolanus of his friends in the city and reports that:

  His answer to me was,

  He could not stay to pick them in a pile

  Of noisome musty chaff. He said 'twas folly,

  For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt

  And still to nose th'offense.

  —Act V, scene i, lines 24-28

  Even at best, with all possible motive, Coriolanus seems to have skirted the edge of madness here, for as Menenius points out:

  For one poor grain or two!

  I am one of those; his mother, wife, his child,

  —Act V, scene i, lines 28-29

  There seems little hope for penetrating the red veil of madness that has closed over Coriolanus' vengeful mind. Cominius says:

  … all hope is vain

  Unless his noble mother and his wife,

  Who (as I hear) mean to solicit him

  For mercy to his country.

  —Act V, scene i, lines 70-74

  Wife, mother, child…

  Even this faint possibility seems to wither. Menenius is urged to try his luck with Coriolanus, but he is thrust scornfully away and Coriolanus denies that anyone, even his dearest, can sway him. He says to Menenius:

  Wife, mother, child, I know not.

  My affairs Are servanted to others.

  —Act V, scene ii, lines 83-84

  Has Coriolanus the strength to turn against his own mother? Perhaps, but only because he has a substitute. He remains the little boy who must have parental approval. Having brutally turned away Menenius, he turns to Aufidius and seeks approval with what might almost be a simper:

  This man, Aufidius,

  Was my beloved in Rome; yet thou behold'st.

  —Act V, scene ii, lines 93-94

  Aufidius knows his man. Gravely, he gives him what he wants and tells him he is a good boy:

  You keep a constant temper.

  —Act V, scene ii, line 95

  … I'll speak a little

  But now the women come: his wife, his mother, the fair Valeria. His young son is also there.

  Coriolanus kneels to his mother, but holds firm, saying:

  Do not bid me

  Dismiss my soldiers, or capitulate

  Again with Rome's mechanics.

  Tell me not Wherein I seem unnatural.

  Desire not T'allay my rages and revenges with

  Your colder reasons.

  —Act V, scene iii, lines 81-86

  He is determined to place his own grievances above Rome and wishes to cancel his mother's arguments even before she makes them.

  But now Volumnia, in a speech of noble eloquence, shows that she places Rome before him and herself. Too late she tries to teach him that life is not a matter of blows and rages alone; that there are softer and nobler virtues:

  Think'st thou it honorable for a noble man

  Still [always] to remember wrongs?

  —Act V, scene iii, lines 154-55

  And when Coriolanus remains obdurate, she rises to return to Rome to die and then uses the one remaining weapon at her disposal, and the most terrible of all:

  Come, let us go.

  This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;

  His wife is in Corioles, and his child

  Like him by chance. Yet give us our dispatch.

  I am hushed until our city be a-fire,

  And then I'll speak a little.

  —Act V, scene iii, lines 177-82

  With a terrible understatement, she makes it clear that when the city is burning, she will call down a dying mother's curse upon her son.

  O my mother, mother…

  And before this Coriolanus cannot stand. He collapses utterly and cries out:

  O my mother, mother! O!

  You have won a happy victory to Rome;

  But, for your son-believe it, O, believe it!-

  Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,

  If not most mortal to him.

  —Act V, scene iii, lines 185-89

  He turns away; he will not fight further against Rome; and he asks Au-fidius to make peace. Aufidius is willing to do so. With Coriolanus not in the fight, Rome will be difficult to take. It would be better to make the peace, use the results against Coriolanus, and perhaps fight Rome another time when Coriolanus is not present either to help or to hinder. So much we can assume. Aufidius actually says, in an aside, that he is glad at this development since it will help him ruin Coriolanus.

  … made for Alexander

  In Rome Menenius is gloomy. He tells an anxious Sicinius that he doesn't think Volumnia will prevail; after all, he himself did not. He describes Coriolanus in the most forbidding terms as nothing but a war machine:

  He sits in his state

  as a thing made for Alexander.

  —Act V, scene iv, lines 22-23

  He is, in other words, as immobile, as aloof, as untouched by humanity as a statue of Alexander the Great. This is an anachronism, for Alexander lived nearly a century and a half after Coriolanus and died in 323 b.c.

  But almost at that moment comes the news that Coriolanus has given in and that the army is gone. Rome goes mad with joy and flocks to the gates to greet Volumnia.

  … thou boy of tears

  The Volscian army is back in Corioles now and Aufidius is ready to strike and rid himself of the incubus he had earlier accepted; an incubus that would have been worth its cost if it had brought them the destruction of Rome. But it had not, for, as Aufidius says bitterly:

  … at his nurse's tears

  He whined and roared away your victory;

  —Act V, scene vi, lines 97-98

  Coriolanus, stupefied, calk on Mars, the god of war, and Aufidius says, with contempt:

  Name not the god, thou boy of tears!

  —Act V, scene vi, line 101

  For the first time, Coriolanus has been openly called what he is. He is a boy; a tearful, butterfly-killing mamma's boy who never grew up except in muscles; who did all his warlike deeds so that his mother might clap her hands over him; and who broke up at last when his mother said "Bad boy!"
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br />   Coriolanus cannot accept Aufidius' sneer because in his heart he knows it is true, and he dare not let himself know it consciously. He keeps repeating that word, shouting:

  "Boy!" False hound!

  If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,

  That, like an eagle in a dovecote,

  I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.

  Alone I did it. "Boy"?

  —Act V, scene vi, lines 113-17

  His last boast is of his feat at Corioli in entering the city and fighting alone. At the end as at the beginning he is alone in the universe, he with his mother. Is that being a boy, he asks? Of course it is. A foolish act of boyish braggadocio is no less foolish because it succeeds.

  And once again, Coriolanus' rage and tactlessness draws down anger upon himself. He is killed by numerous swords that have been prepared for the purpose by Aufidius himself.

  The Volscian nobles are taken aback. They regret the sudden killing without trial, but one says of Coriolanus:

  His own impatience

  Takes from Aufidius a great part of blame.

  Let's make the best of it.

  —Act V, scene vi, lines 145-47

  It is at this point of the climax of self-ruin that Shakespeare ends the tale.

  Plutarch tells a little more. Coriolanus is honorably buried and the city of Rome pays homage to the mother, if not the son, by allowing her to mourn for him the full period of ten months that was then customary.

  And at some time, in a future battle, Tullus Aufidius died in arms against Rome. Roman power grew steadily and Volscian power declined, and in the end it was Rome, Rome, Rome, over all Latium, all Italy, all the Mediterranean world.

  11. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

  The first Plutarchian play (see page I-213) written by Shakespeare (probably in 1599) concerned the time four and a half centuries after Coriolanus. Rome had survived the Gallic sack and the onslaught of Hannibal of Carthage. It had spread itself west and east over the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and now all those shores were either Roman territory or under the control of some Roman puppet king.

  But Rome's troubles were coming from within. There was no longer any serious question of conquest from without. That was impossible and would remain impossible for several centuries. Now, however, there had come an inner struggle. For half a century there had been a sputtering string of conflicts, between generals, for control, and the play opens when the conflict seems to have been decided.

  The victor is the greatest Roman of them all-Julius Caesar.

  .. .get you home

  The events of the first scene, in the streets of the city of Rome, are those of October 45 b.c. Caesar has just returned from Spain, where he defeated the last armies of those adversaries that had stood out against him.

  He was now undisputed master of all the Roman realm, from end to end of the Mediterranean Sea. It seemed Rome was ready now to experience a rich and prosperous period of peace under the great Julius.

  Not all of Rome is delighted by this turn of events, however. Those who had opposed Caesar and his policies might have been beaten into silence, but not into approval-and not even always into silence.

  Caesar stood for an utter and thoroughgoing reform of the political system of the Roman Republic, which in the last century had fallen into decay and corruption. In this, he was supported chiefly by the commons and opposed chiefly by the senators and the aristocratic families.

  In the first scene, though, Shakespeare pictures not the aristocratic opposition, but that of a pair of tribunes, Flavius and Marullus. This is odd, for the office of tribune was originally established to protect the commons against the aristocrats (an event which is at the core of the events in Cor-iolanus, see page I-222). One would have thought they would be more likely to support Caesar than oppose him.

  Actually, however, the matter of the tribunes is borrowed by Shakespeare from Plutarch, but is moved earlier in time. If the incident had been left in its Plutarchian place, it would have seemed more apt.

  At any rate, in Shakespeare's version the populace is swarming out to greet the homecoming Caesar, when they are met by the tribunes. One of them, Flavius, cries out:

  Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!

  —Act I, scene i, line 1

  … rejoice in his triumph

  One of the populace, a cobbler, explains the activity:

  … indeed, sir, we make holiday to see Caesar

  and to re joice in his triumph.

  —Act I, scene i, lines 33-34

  The "triumph" was an old Roman custom borrowed from the ancient Etruscans centuries before Caesar's time. A victorious general entered the city in state, preceded by government officials and followed by his army and captured prisoners. The procession moved along decorated streets and between lines of cheering spectators to the Capitol, where religious services were held. (It was rather analogous to the modem ticker tape procession down Fifth Avenue.)

  The day was a high festival, with plenty of food and drink for all at government expense, so that the populace was delighted partly with the aura of victory and partly with the fun. For the general himself, it represented the highest possible honor.

  In My 46 b.c., more than a year before the play opens, Caesar had returned to Rome after nine years of conquest in Gaul and three years of civil war in Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Africa. He had then broken all public records for magnificence by holding four triumphs, one after another, over each of four sets of foreign enemies he had conquered. These were the Gauls, the Egyptians, the Pontines of Asia Minor, and the Numid-ians of Africa.

  After that, he went to Spain for one last victorious battle and now he was returning for one last triumph.

  What tributaries …

  The cobbler's reply but further irritates the tribune Marullus, who cries out in anguish:

  Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?

  What tributaries follow him to Rome,

  To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?

  —Act I, scene i, lines 35-37

  Marullus has a point here. The whole purpose of a triumph was to demonstrate the victories of Romans over their non-Roman enemies-over foreigners. Civil wars in themselves could bring no true conquests; Roman fought Roman so that a Roman victory necessarily implied a Roman defeat as well and a triumph was impossible.

  Caesar, in the course of the civil war, had beaten armies under Roman generals, but he had been careful not to celebrate such victories in specific triumphs. He had brought as prisoners only foreigners who had fought against him, even when these (the Numidians, for instance) had been fighting as allies of Roman factions and even though the Roman soldiers who opposed him bore the brunt of the defeat.

  In his last battle in Spam, however, there were no foreign enemies. He had fought only Romans and if he had a triumph it could be only over Romans. He did not bring home a true "conquest," no true "tributaries," and why, therefore, a triumph?

  Knew you not Pompey.. .

  The tribunes can be even more specific. Marullus says:

  Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft

  Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,

  To tow'rs and windows, yea, to chimney tops,

  Your infants in your arms, and there have sat

  The livelong day, with patient expectation,

  To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.

  —Act I, scene i, lines 40-45

  Gnaeus Pompeius (usually known as Pompey to English-speaking people) was born in 106 b.c. and made a great name for himself as a general at quite an early age, largely because of his talent for being on the right side in the right place at the right time. He won important victories in Spain, for instance, in 77 b.c. against a rebellious Roman general, largely because that general happened to be assassinated at the crucial moment.

  He was given the right to append "Magnus" ("the Great") to his name as a result of early victories, which accounts
for the tribune's reference to "great Pompey."

  In 67 b.c. he accomplished something really surprising. Pirates had been infesting the Mediterranean Sea for a long time. They had evaded all Roman force and had all but made trade impossible, when Pompey was called to the task of suppressing them. He was put in charge of the entire Mediterranean coast to a distance of fifty miles inland for three years and was told to use that time for destroying the pirates. He managed to clear them all out in three months!

  He was then put in charge of the Roman armies in Asia Minor. Again, this was a tremendous piece of luck for him. An earlier Roman general, competent but unpopular, had almost completed the job when his troops rebelled. Pompey took over, cleared up the last remaining forces of the enemy, and got all the credit.

  In 61 b.c. he returned to Rome and at the age of forty-five received the most magnificent triumph Rome had seen up to that time. It is presumably partly with reference to this triumph that the tribunes spoke of the people waiting to see the great Pompey.

  Pompey was not of a great aristocratic family himself and would have been proud to be accepted by the senators as one of their own. The senators, however, had learned from experience that successful generals of the non-aristocratic classes could be dangerous, and they watched Pompey carefully.