Robert N. Watson

Coriolanus and the ‘Common Part’

This article seeks to briefly explore some roots of The Tragedy of Coriolanus: historical, philosophical, psychological, sociological, theological, even etymological roots. The play grows, I believe, from a synergistic set of underlying tragic questions. How can a person who aspires to embody a cultural ideal – in this case, the ancient Roman criteria for manly virtue – survive his entanglement in the life within and around him that compromises or contradicts that ideal? How, in other words, does a devotion to nobility, integrity and a centred self that is always like itself (sui similis: a Senecan tag Shakespeare echoes repeatedly) endure reminders of all it has in common with supposedly lower forms of life, its dependency on give-and-take with a community, and the casting and shattering of that self into parts? How would that revered legacy have withstood theChristian and especially Calvinist doctrines of Shakespeare’s world – doctrines that deemed no person self-sufficient, and insisting that all must instead depend on a communion of bread and blood for eternal life, and that God alone is ‘resolute, and immutable, always one, and like himself, not wavering or varying in those things which once he willed’ (Lipsius, De Constantia, 1.17; 1584: p. 53)? How, finally, does this tragic topic reflect the transhistorical reality of the human mind and spirit delimited by the mortal body? In Caius Martius Coriolanus’s war against ‘the beast /With many heads’ (4.1.1–2), the boundaries defining the human species and the human individual stand or fall together. Human exceptionalism is coded as Roman exceptionalism in Coriolanus’s animal epithets for those who fall short of his ideal. Taken together, his hatred of the undifferentiated plebian masses, his embarrassment about his wounds, his determination to ‘stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin’ (5.3.35–7), and his threats to purge with fire anyone who threatens to compromise or complicate his martial definition of himself and the Roman body politic offer a fascinating limit case to the classical project of selfhood. Historical contexts, close reading and data mining all reveal this play’s ambivalence about the Senecan insularity of its title character. Just a few years before Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus, Sir William Cornwallis’s Discourses upon Seneca the tragedian warned that ‘No extreme continueth’ because nature ‘hath given limits to all things, and to all things courses fitting their natures’; otherwise ‘there would be nothing, for combating against one another, & setting their forces one against another; the Victor would convert all things to his owne nature, and that would destroy nature, whose glory is the multiplicitie of her instruments, and the working of them with one another’. That conversion is practically the mission statement of the disincorporation called Caius Martius Coriolanus, who threatens his fellow Roman soldiers that he will ‘leave the foe / And make my wars on you’ (1.4.40–1) and who ‘would

Lord Capulet’s Lost Compromise: A Tragic Emendation and the Binary Dynamics of Romeo and Juliet

after hearing conflicting testimony from the Montague and Capulet camps about the slaying of Tybalt, the Prince of Verona asks, “Romeo slew him, he slew Mercutio; / Who now the price of his dear blood doth owe?” The answer comes from Romeo’s father: “Not Romeo, Prince, he was Mercutio’s friend. / His fault concludes but what the law should end, / The life of Tybalt” (3.1.184–88). Or at least it does unless you happen to own a copy of the 1963 Signet edition, which—unlike every other modern edition of the play I can find—gives that answer to Juliet’s father instead. Otherwise a reader can traipse back through the hall of fame of Shakespeare editors without finding that little speech attributed to Lord Capulet. Try the great Dr. Johnson (1765), Capell’s carefully researched collection (1768), the scrupulous improvements of Malone (1790), the lavish Steevens/Boydell editions (1802), the notorious Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare (1820), Collier (1842), Furness’s Variorum (1871), Dowden (1900), Sisson (1953), Dover Wilson (1955), George Walton Williams (1964), the controversial Rowse (1968), Craig (1931), Kittredge (1936) and Ribner’s update (1978), Harbage’s Pelican collection of the works and the new version by Orgel and Braunmuller (2002), Raffel for Harold Bloom’s series (2004), the old and new Folger editions (1959, 2004), or Bate and Rasmussen’s RSC Complete Works (2007). Dig through all three Arden editions, both the traditionalist old Oxford version and Wells and Tay-

Shakespeare’s New Words

A WORD-WAR WON That Shakespeare invented – or, at least, successfully promoted – more new English words than anyone else in history is a truth universally acknowledged. But how and why did he do that? An otherwise superb exploration of ‘Some Functions of Shakespearean Word-Formation’ identifies many technical purposes – ‘To ensure coincidence of metrical and lexical stress’, for example – but does not attend to what were surely important functions for Shakespeare: to draw paying customers to his plays by appealing to their need for cutting-edge social tools, and to articulate the complexities of mood and consciousness that are a hallmark of his literary achievement. This double business – selling to a wide popular audience, while also serving a fathomless interior intellect – may seem contradictory, but the combination is surely essential to Shakespeare’s greatness. The shared life of the vernacular, granted new range and prestige by the printing press, was extended by the English stage; as poets, notably Spenser, reached backward for archaisms, perhaps to appeal to a fading aristocratic economy of patronage, playwrights pushed ahead. The Elizabethan theatre was a ‘knowledge marketplace’, and a key commodity in that market was lexical. English was evolving rapidly, not only because print and trade were accelerating exchange with other languages (to which English has always been unusually receptive) and because social and technological revolutions were requiring new terminologies, but also because the disappearance of grammatical inflections in English allowed words to be easily converted from one part of speech to another, as Shakespeare liked to do, by what linguists call ‘zero derivation’ and Renaissance rhetoricians called anthimeria . As I have argued elsewhere, these new products were manufactured and sold by Shakespeare and his rival playwrights.