The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy by Michael Neill & David Schalkwyk

Author:Michael Neill & David Schalkwyk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

SERVICE

Beginning with Aufidius’ disquisition on Coriolanus corrects the usual picture of Coriolanus as a man whose singular military prowess is matched by a complete lack of charisma and an intense aversion to public life. The person presented to us by the two Volscian soldiers not only has the capacity to displace Aufidius as the nourishing source of bewitched adulation—‘Your soldiers use him as the grace fore meat, | Their talk at table, and their thanks at end’ (4.7.4–5)—but is also a naturally sovereign being who will take Rome without effort: ‘All places yields to him ere he sits down … I think he’ll be to Rome as the osprey is to the fish, who takes it | By sovereignty of nature’ (28, 33–5).

The change in Aufidius’ laudatory account comes, however, when he mentions Coriolanus not as a natural commander but as a servant: ‘First he was | A noble servant to them, but he could not | Carry his honours even’ (35–6). Seeing Coriolanus not as a sovereign raptor but rather as a ‘noble servant’, introduces a conceptual issue that runs throughout the play. Whom does Coriolanus serve? Who is included under Aufidius’ pronoun, ‘them’? He has just given us a catalogue of all the strata that make up the Rome’s population: the ‘nobility’, ‘senators and patricians’, the ‘tribunes’, and ‘their people’? Does Coriolanus serve all of them? We are reminded of the question by the tribune, Sicenius, ‘What is the city but the people?’ and the citizens’ response, ‘True | The people are the city’ (3.1.200–1). If Coriolanus is the servant of the city—that is to say, the people—he cannot possibly be endowed with the natural sovereignty of the osprey vis-à-vis the fish. But Coriolanus himself accuses the people of reneging on their duty of service:

I'll give my reasons,

More worthier than their voices. They know the corn

Was not our recompense, resting well assured

That ne’er did service for’t. Being pressed to th’ war,

Even when the navel of the state was touched,

They would not thread the gates. This kind of service

Did not deserve corn gratis.

(3.1.122–7)

Not many critics attend to these conflicted notions of service in the play, but they are crucial to its insistent questions about the politics of obligation, representation, and deserving.

Aufidius’ shift from praising Coriolanus’ natural sovereignty to his flaws involves the concept of service. A ‘noble servant’ to the people of Rome, Coriolanus was nonetheless unable to ‘carry his honours even’, with proper temperament or control. Aufidius offers three possible reasons for this failing: ‘pride’, ‘defect of judgment’, or ‘nature, | Not to be other than one thing’, without settling on any one. Anyone who has watched Coriolanus’ behaviour up to now would probably go for all three, but his companionate enemy refuses to go so far. He not only declines to attribute all such faults to Coriolanus, but he also proclaims that ‘he hath merit | To choke it in the utt’rance’—that is to say, that his good qualities are able to stifle and silence his faults.

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