The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works
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385
And Dromio my man did bring them me.
I see we still did meet each other’s man,
And I was ta’en for him, and he for me,
And thereupon these errors are arose.
ANTIPHOLUS E.
These ducats pawn I for my father here.
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DUKE It shall not need, thy father hath his life.
COURTESAN Sir, I must have that diamond from you.
ANTIPHOLUS E.
There, take it, and much thanks for my good cheer.
ABBESS Renowned duke, vouchsafe to take the pains
To go with us into the abbey here,
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And hear at large discoursed all our fortunes;
And all that are assembled in this place,
That by this sympathised one day’s error
Have suffer’d wrong, go, keep us company.
And we shall make full satisfaction.
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Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons, and till this present hour
My heavy burden ne’er delivered.
The duke, my husband, and my children both,
And you, the calendars of their nativity,
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Go to a gossips’ feast, and joy with me,
After so long grief, such felicity.
DUKE With all my heart, I’ll gossip at this feast.
Exeunt; the two Dromios and two brothers
Antipholus remain behind.
DROMIO S.
Master, shall I fetch your stuff from shipboard?
ANTIPHOLUS E.
Dromio, what stuff of mine hast thou embark’d?
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DROMIO S.
Your goods that lay at host, sir, in the Centaur.
ANTIPHOLUS S.
He speaks to me; I am your master, Dromio.
Come, go with us, we’ll look to that anon;
Embrace thy brother there, rejoice with him.
Exeunt the two Antipholuses together.
DROMIO S. There is a fat friend at your master’s house,
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That kitchen’d me for you to-day at dinner;
She now shall be my sister, not my wife.
DROMIO E.
Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother:
I see by you I am a sweet-fac’d youth;
Will you walk in to see their gossiping?
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DROMIO S. Not I, sir, you are my elder.
DROMIO E. That’s a question, how shall we try it?
DROMIO S.
We’ll draw cuts for the senior; till then, lead thou
first.
DROMIO E. Nay then, thus:
We came into the world like brother and brother,
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And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before
another. Exeunt.
Coriolanus
Coriolanus was first published in the Folio of 1623 as the first of the tragedies. On stylistic grounds it is usually dated about 1608, and possible topical references seem to confirm that date. The citizens’ anger over the shortage of corn may well refer to the corn riots of 1607 in the Midlands (which would have lent immediacy to the ‘sedition at Rome’ described by Plutarch as partly motivated ‘by reason of famine’), and ‘the coal of fire upon the ice’ may allude to the great frost in the winter of 1607-8 when the Thames froze and, according to a contemporary pamphlet, entrepreneurial Londoners were ‘ready with pans of coals to warm your fingers’.
The main source of the play is Plutarch’s ‘Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’ in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans which Shakespeare read in the English translation by Thomas North (1579). Plutarch’s ‘Life’ is a straightforward biography, beginning with Caius Martius’ ancestry and ending with his death. Shakespeare found in Plutarch all the necessary details for his play, but he imposed, as always, a different shape and emphasis to suit his dramatic vision, and amplified the roles of Menenius, Aufidius and Volumnia to bear greater significance. By contrast with the astonishing variety and amplitude of its immediate predecessor Antony and Cleopatra, also based on Plutarch, Coriolanus is sober and austere, its main character no ‘mine of bounty’ like Antony but arrogant and rigid, even in his virtue ‘too noble for the world’.
Shakespeare exploits the conflict between Coriolanus and the people of Rome, but not as a simple opposition of the noble individual and the ‘multiplying swarm’. Coriolanus is, indeed, a man of integrity, but if he is too honest to fawn before the populace for its support, he is also proud and contemptuous, caring little for Rome’s citizens, ‘the mutable, rank-scented meinie’, and finally willing to sacrifice the city itself to satisfy his honour. Conversely, the people, who rightly resent his aristocratic disdain and precociously declare that ‘the people are the city’, are themselves fickle and easily manipulated by the tribunes. Perhaps, as Coleridge suggested, the play ‘illustrates the wonderful philosophic impartiality in Shakespeare’s politics’; certainly its political sympathies are multiple and complex. While Coriolanus marks a further stage in Shakespeare’s exploration of Rome and romanitas, it focuses on an earlier moment in Roman history than either Antony and Cleopatra or its predecessor, Julius Caesar. Between them Coriolanus and Julius Caesar virtually define the historical limits of the Roman Republic. Caius Martius’ victory at Corioli, from which he earned his surname, was won in 439 BC, almost four hundred years before the murder of Julius Caesar in the Forum (44 BC), one of the events which led to the foundation of the Roman Empire under Augustus (Shakespeare’s Octavius Caesar).
The early republic portrayed in Coriolanus would, however, certainly have been of interest to many in Shakespeare’s audiences, who would have found in the struggle between an elected government, dependent for its authority upon the will of the people, and a polity still overseen by traditional aristocratic privilege, a powerful image of political strains just beginning to be articulated in the political discourses of Jacobean England.
But the play is also the play of a tragic individual, noble but flawed, his strengths and weaknesses inextricably entangled. Not only are his virtues more fit for war than for peace; his nobility too easily degenerates into an isolating pride and a withering contempt for others: ‘You speak o’th’ people / As if you were a god to punish, not / A man of their infirmity.’ But he is indeed a man of their infirmity, whose very drive to excel is born of a human need and vulnerability he fears to acknowledge. His self-chosen isolation, his wish that he could be, however improbably, ‘author of himself’, is revealed to be a terrible compensation for the world of relatedness he would, but at last cannot, deny. In his last Roman play Shakespeare joins the personal and the political in a bleak vision of both the city and its greatest hero tragically self-divided.
The role of Coriolanus has been memorably played by leading actors from John Philip Kemble to Laurence Olivier, but in performance the part of his mother, Volumnia, whose victory over her son is the play’s major climax, is of almost equal significance. The play’s complex embodiment of its political debates has led to its propagandist use in support of all political positions from monarchist to communist: performances of it have been known to provoke civil unrest and even riots.
The Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.
LIST OF ROLES
Caius MARTIUS
afterwards Caius Martius Coriolanus
generals against the Volscians
MENENIUS Agrippa
friend to Coriolanus
tribunes of the people
YOUNG MARTIUS
son to Coriolanus
A Roman HERALD
Nicanor, a ROMAN
Tullus AUFIDIUS
general of the Volscians
LIEUTENANT to Aufidius
CONSPIRATORS with Aufidius
Adrian, a VOLSCIAN
CITIZEN of Antium
Two Volscian WATCHMEN
VOLUMNIA
/>
mother to Coriolanus
VIRGILIA
wife to Coriolanus
VALERIA
friend to Virgilia
GENTLEWOMAN
attending on Virgilia
Roman and Volscian Senators, Patricians, Aediles, Lictors, Soldiers, Citizens, Messengers, Servants to Aufidius and other Attendants.
Coriolanus
1.1 Enter a company of mutinous Citizens, with staves, clubs and other weapons.
1 CITIZEN Before we proceed any further, hear me
speak.
ALL Speak, speak.
1 CITIZEN You are all resolved rather to die than to
famish?
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ALL Resolved, resolved.
1 CITIZEN First, you know Caius Martius is chief enemy
to the people.
ALL We know’t, we know’t.
1 CITIZEN Let us kill him, and we’ll have corn at our
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own price. Is’t a verdict?
ALL No more talking on’t; let it be done. Away, away!
2 CITIZEN One word, good citizens.
1 CITIZEN We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians
good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us. If
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they would yield us but the superfluity while it were
wholesome, we might guess they relieved us
humanely; but they think we are too dear: the leanness
that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an
inventory to particularise their abundance; our
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sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with
our pikes, ere we become rakes. For the gods know, I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for
revenge.
2 CITIZEN Would you proceed especially against Caius
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Martius?
ALL Against him first. He’s a very dog to the
commonalty.
2 CITIZEN Consider you what services he has done for
his country?
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1 CITIZEN Very well, and could be content to give him
good report for’t, but that he pays himself with being
proud.
2 CITIZEN Nay, but speak not maliciously.
1 CITIZEN I say unto you, what he hath done famously,
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he did it to that end: though soft-conscienced men can
be content to say it was for his country, he did it to
please his mother, and to be partly proud, which he is,
even to the altitude of his virtue.
2 CITIZEN What he cannot help in his nature, you
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account a vice in him. You must in no way say he is
covetous.
1 CITIZEN If I must not, I need not be barren of
accusations. He hath faults, with surplus, to tire in
repetition. [shouts within] What shouts are these? The
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other side o’th’ city is risen: why stay we prating here?
To th’ Capitol!
ALL Come, come.
1 CITIZEN Soft, who comes here?
Enter MENENIUS AGRIPPA.
2 CITIZEN Worthy Menenius Agrippa, one that hath
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always loved the people.
1 CITIZEN He’s one honest enough, would all the rest
were so!
MENENIUS What work’s, my countrymen, in hand?
Where go you
With bats and clubs? The matter? Speak, I pray you.
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1 CITIZEN Our business is not unknown to th’ Senate;
they have had inkling this fortnight what we intend to
do, which now we’ll show ’em in deeds. They say poor
suitors have strong breaths: they shall know we have
strong arms too.
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MENENIUS
Why masters, my good friends, mine honest
neighbours,
Will you undo yourselves?
1 CITIZEN We cannot, sir, we are undone already.
MENENIUS I tell you, friends, most charitable care
Have the patricians of you. For your wants,
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Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves, as lift them
Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
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Appear in your impediment. For the dearth,
The gods, not the patricians, make it, and
Your knees to them, not arms, must help. Alack,
You are transported by calamity
Thither where more attends you; and you slander
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The helms o’th’ state, who care for you like fathers,
When you curse them as enemies.
1 CITIZEN Care for us? True indeed! They ne’er cared
for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support
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usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established
against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes
daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat
us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear
us.
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MENENIUS Either you must
Confess yourselves wondrous malicious,
Or be accus’d of folly. I shall tell you
A pretty tale; it may be you have heard it,
But since it serves my purpose, I will venture
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To stale’t a little more.
1 CITIZEN Well, I’ll hear it, sir; yet you must not think
to fob off our disgrace with a tale; but, and’t please