Shakespeare

Yet the play is affected by all the pressures of the time. The great insurrection in the Midlands of the previous year had been bloodily suppressed, but the summer of 1608 was marked by dearth and famine. On 2 June the king issued “A Proclamation for the preuenting and remedying of the dearth of Graine, and other Victuals” but it had only limited effectiveness. The people were starving from want of bread, and it is not at all surprising that the first scene of Coriolanus concerns the plight of the Roman citizens who are “all resolu’d rather to dy then to famish.” The first citizen declares that they must “revenge this with our Pikes, ere we become Rakes. For the Gods know, I speake this in hunger for Bread, not in thirst for Reuenge”(19-22). Yet it would be wrong to consider Shakespeare as fundamentally sympathetic to their cause. In Coriolanus the crowd is portrayed as fickle and ever changeable, as light and as variable as the wind. In what seems to be an unconscious token of his attitude Shakespeare writes the stage-direction, “Enter a rabble of Plebeians.” They are contrasted with the Roman nobles who in a fit of anachronism he calls “all the Gentry.” The tribunes of the people are not treated by Shakespeare with any great respect, either. His opinion was shared by King James, who castigated the parliamentarians who failed to pass his expenses as “Tribunes of the people, whose mouths could not be stopped.”³ As a servant of the king, too, Shakespeare could not be seen to condone insurrection or rebellion. All of his instincts would in any case have been against it. He could draw attention to the plight of the poorer people without bread, while at the same time firmly withholding assent from their campaign of violence. That is what happens in Coriolanus.

There are other significant aspects to the play’s topicality. The first citizen launches a direct assault upon hoarding, and upon those who “Suffer vs to famish, and their Store-houses cramm’d with Graine”(76-77). It so happens that Shakespeare himself had already been noted for the storage of 80 bushels of malt at New Place, as we have seen, and there is no reason to doubt that he continued to store or hoard quantities of corn or malt. So through the irate voice of the first citizen he adverts to himself. It is a most extraordinary act of theatrical impersonality, suggesting very forcefully that his imagination was not violated by sentiment of any kind. He could even see himself without fellow feeling. When it is also noticed that some of the charges against the Midlands rioters are here replicated as charges against the nobleman, Coriolanus, then we realise that the events of the day have been displaced and reordered in an immense act of creative endeavour. Everything is changed. It is not a question of impartiality, or of refusing to take sides. It is a natural and instinctive process of the imagination. It is not a matter of determining where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie, weighing up the relative merits of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. It is a question of recognising that Shakespeare had no sympathies at all. There is no need to “take sides” when the characters are doing it for you.

Which is as much as to say that his sympathies, such as they were, lay entirely with the unfolding of the drama. It might even be suggested that the food riots at the beginning of the play (not present in the source, which merely describes the popular clamour of the Romans against usury) may simply have been Shakespeare’s way of arresting the attention of his audience. It was a way of allowing them access to the world of ancient Rome. It was a way of gaining their imaginative assent by presenting something topical and familiar. Certainly the theme of dearth disappears from the gathering drama. Once it had achieved its purpose, it was forgotten. It is an important token of Shakespeare’s true response to the world, which may well have been one of utter calmness and even of disinterest.