As is to be expected, the language of patriarchy and the language of politics merge. Coriolanus is not merely about politics; it is about what we call sexual politics. The irony throughout the long scene under discussion here (3.2) is that Volumnia, a mother, is prevailing upon her son. She hams it up, lays it on thick ("At thy choice, then," she says with woebegone insincerity). He is subject to her again, like a little boy: "Pray, be content, mother," he says, as if kicking the ground with his toe, "I am going to the marketplace." Off he goes to do his chores! Later he says that he would stand "as if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin." But his mother forever calls him back to his to his condition of dependence—to his contingency. She reminds Coriolanus that he "sucked" his valor from her breast as an infant, and surely this "discountenances" him, as Simone de Beauvoir would say. "The adolescent is discountenanced, he blushes," Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, "if while roaming with his companions he happens to meet his mother, his sisters, any of his female relatives: it is because their presence calls him back to those realms of immanence whence he would fly, exposes roots from which he would tear himself loose. The little boy's irritation when his mother kisses and cajoles him has the same significance; he disowns family, mother, maternal bosom. He would like to have sprung into the world, like Athena fully grown, fully armed, invulnerable." Beauvoir concludes: "To have been conceived and then born an infant is the curse that hangs over his destiny, the impurity that contaminates his being" (147). Would Coriolanus stand as though a man were author of himself and knew no other kin? Well, it is a splendid impossibility. He is always already contaminated. And as for denying his "female relatives," and, through them, his "impure" origins: Cominius later reports that, when he sued for peace before the Volscian army that Coriolanus had brought against Rome, Coriolanus "would not answer to his name": He "forbad all names; / He was a kind of nothing, titleless, / Till he had forged himself a name o'the fire / Of burning Rome." Till Coriolanus "forged" himself a name, that is, by an act of patricide and matricide combined: the sacking of Rome itself. "Wife, mother, child, I know not," he assures Menenius when the latter makes his appeal (5.2.76).

Many times the play suggests that there is something "unnatural" about Volumnia's relation to her son. She has an Amazonian ferocity and thinks of him rather as a husband and lover, as we see in her first long speech. No wonder Coriolanus moves to disown her, however unsuccessfully. She is attempting to comfort her daughter-in-law:

VOLUMNIA. I pray you, daughter, sing, or express yourself in a more comfortable sort. If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love. When yet he was but tender bodied, and the only son of my womb; when youth with comeliness pluck'd all gaze his way; when, for a day of kings' entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding; I, considering how honour would become such a person—that it was no better than picture—like to hang by th' wall, if renown made it not stir—was pleas'd to let him seek danger where he was to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he return'd his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man.

VIRGILIA. But had he died in the business, madam, how then?

VOLUMNIA. Then his good report should have been my son; I therein would have found issue. Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.

But it is precisely a "voluptuary" "out of action" that she ultimately asks her son to become. She would have him flatter the commoners "in their bower." She would melt his steel into the parasite's silk. She would have him diet the rabble in praises sauced with lies. Volumnia hasn't any of the properly yielding temper of Virgilia. Sicinius later demands of her, in disbelief: "Are you mankind?" Whereupon she replies:

Ay, fool; is that a shame? Note but this, fool:

Was not a man my father? Hadst thou foxship

To banish him that struck more blows for Rome

Than thou hast spoken words?

When he asks, "Are you mankind?", Sicinius means, "Are you human?" But we are allowed by the play to wonder whether or not he also asks if she is really "male." (The binary oppositions of man to woman, of masculine to feminine, and of man to child, begin to lose their clarity in this play, just as the binary oppositions of action to speech, and of war to peace, lose theirs.) In any case, Volumnia certainly thinks of herself patrilineally, not matrilineally: "Was not a man my father?" And notice again the distinction here drawn between "striking blows" and "speaking words"; it is a family liability, this habit of thought. But at this late date in the action of the play, Volumnia can hardly expect a distinction that she has herself so ably discredited to do her any good service. She has herself debased the nature of her seat. Sicinius's exasperation with her is justified: "O! blessed heavens!" he says.

Like Lady Macbeth, Volumnia is "unsexed." Because of this, she is monstrous. And in the end, contrary to the natural order of things, she monstrsously undoes her offspring. We know that Coriolanus would stand "as if a man were author of himself." He tries hard to deny his contingency, his dependency, his limitation. His mother terrifies him because, at the end of the day, she represents the mortal point of his origins, and the mortal point also of his end: the womb and the tomb converge, as if in a proverb. In fact, when Volumnia approaches Coriolanus in Act 5, he sees in her chiefly a kind of walking womb: "the honour'd mould / Wherein this trunk was framed," he says, soon to find himself discountenanced yet again. In the body of his mother he sees the thing that "framed" or shaped his "trunk"; that is one meaning of the word "mould." But he may also see the soil out of which he sprang (to take "mould" in its other available sense at that date), and from which he can never pull up the roots of his trunk "as if a man were author of himself." Anyway, he is destined to return to the "mould" in this second sense, once his mother un-mans him, and this is precisely what she has come to do. As I say, the womb and the tomb converge in Volumnia. She is signing her own son's death warrant, and he knows it.

Coriolanus's uncommon ferocity (let us say) is a function of his horror at the fact of his subjection to this womb, to this "mould"; it betokens his anxious struggle to achieve his escape velocity from it. And Rome itself, the city of his origins, which he has come to sack, even, perhaps, to the point of matricide; —Rome itself is a kind of splendid fiction sustained against the natural order of things to blossom, decline, and decay (the barbarians are always at the gates). Rome would stand as though the state were author of itself and knew no other kin; it would repudiate the doctrine, as the Buddhist's call it, of "dependent arising." But, after all, nothing gold can stay. Shakespeare lays bare all of the fractious instability that would doom republic and empire alike. And the deeper lesson of Coriolanus may be the one Shelley discerns in Ozymandias's remains.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, an despair!"
Nothing else remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias meant one thing; his fate means another. Despair (ye Mighty) that no rigor, no integrity—no matter how intensely achieved—will last. Steel turns to parasite's silk, and silk to dust. "The Earth Mother engulfs the bones of her children," Beauvoir says. The carrion crow pecks the eagle. Rome and Coriolanus both fall away. "Sink, my knee, i' the earth," is all a discountenanced mother's son can say when Volumnia makes her final appeal. Self-authorship? Coriolanus makes a colossal wreck of it all. He cannot, in the end, trample either on his mother's "womb" or on his wife's (5.3.124-27). The womb exacts its tribute from every authority. Here is what the mother says to the son:

Thou hast never in thy life
Show'd they dear mother any courtesy;
When she—poor hen! Fond of no second brood—
Has cluck'd thee to the wars and safely home,
Loaden with honour.

Her patience exhausted—she had precious little to begin with—Volumnia turns to scolding and pouting at a man with an army of Volscians behind him! She makes a boy of Caius Martius Coriolanus. And that is, for any would-be self-made man, the most truly "discountenancing" horror. Tullus Aufidius says: "At a few drops of women's rheum, which are / As cheap as lies, he sold the blood and labour / Of our great action: therefore shall he die" (5.5.46-48). Coriolanus would hardly disagree. He had already passed the sentence on himself: "O mother," he says, taking her by the hand, for your son "most dangerously have you prevail'd / If not most mortal to him. But let it come" (5.3.185-89). Aufidius knows how best to humiliate the man. "Thou boy of tears," he says, speaking with the contempt men (anxiously) reserve for all who yield to the womb (5.5.101). But Aufiduis is no better than Coriolanus. He wins his game by policy and cunning, by "false-faced soothing." He wins it with the "base" parasite's tongue of silk, not with a clean and unsheathed sword. He knows that "action is eloquence," as Volumnia always said it was. "I am struck with sorrow," he declares after Coriolanus has been murdered at his behest, and as he shoulders the litter bearing away the great warrior's corpse. Coriolanus may kneel before the womb, but Aufidius plays the harlot's part like he was born for it.

And when all is said, perhaps Coriolanus is about neither the state nor class conflict. Perhaps it is instead about the overwhelming gravity of the womb. Coriolanus suffers the trauma of never having truly been born into self-hood at all. Who is he apart from what his mother makes him when she sends him off to the wars while still a boy? Or when she "prompts" him to make a scene before the plebeians and their tribunes? Coriolanus's problem is this: he is a character in a play called Volumnia who mistakes himself for a real person. And I would venture here a further suggestion. Coriolanus—with our "post-structuralists," and for that matter with Macbeth and The Tempest—intimates that we are all characters in a "play" we take no part in authoring; and intimates also that we are forever mistaking ourselves for self-authored "persons"—for persons of real "integrity." The play says: All there is to life is a precipitous fall back into what existentialists like Beauvoir used to call our "immanence." We would, like Coriolanus, be free of contingency. But there can be no real autonomy—no "self" that is not, in its last act, as insubstantial as a "twist of rotten silk" (5.5.96). Coriolanus's efforts to purify the battlefield of the contamination of the stage—to purify his "acts" of "acting" —come to nothing. Coriolanus is a play about the impossibility of ever really emerging from the matrix, of ever really extracting an autonomous self from the "mould wherein it was framed."

If only incidentally, it is worth asking again whether or not there is some admonition in this play for England in those first years of a Stuart regime that would, at the hands of the tribunes of the people, meet its end on the block in 1649. If it were not so nice a problem to fix Shakespeare in his plays, I might say he felt it coming on, and felt it already with a kind of "Cavalier" regret. In few of his plays do the common folk make so poor a showing as they do in Coriolanus. "Y'are goodly things, you voices!" says Cominius in contempt of the citizens and their republicanism; and the text certainly bears him out. In fact, the unsettling thing about the play is not that Coriolanus treats the people with contempt; the unsettling thing is that they really deserve no better. We are well on our way to Timon of Athens. The people's own tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius, seem to acknowledge as much, as when Brutus scolds the good citizens for foolishly departing from the script he had given them to play: "Could you not have told [Coriolanus] as you were lesson'd?" he complains (2.3.184-85). He is right to scold them, too. These citizens do not so much want power as want to be flattered that they already possess it. (In this they differ little from Americans in the election year of 2008, or in any election year.) And it is to that end that Brutus and Sicinius stage their parody of democracy, or try to. Given what this play says about politics, how could so able a fascinator and seducer of the people as Shakespeare not take part with Coriolanus in rising, or in trying to rise, above it all? He had seen how the thing was done—how action and eloquence can be so perfectly confused in the minds of the rabble. Still, Coriolanus's enterprise is not the sort of thing anyone ought to bet on. The play that takes him for its title finally says, to patricians and commoners alike (and to playwrights and audiences alike): A plague on both your houses.

Works Cited

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. and ed. by H.M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Ed., with an "Introduction," by Lee Bliss. Cambridge University Press, 2000. References to Bliss's "Introduction" are given by page number.

Contributor's Note

Mark Richardson is author of The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and the Poetics (Illinois, 1997), and editor of The Collected Prose of Robert Frost (Harvard, 2007). He teaches at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.