This post is Part 8 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.

I’m not sure there’s a case to be made for Coriolanus being one of Shakespeare’s best plays, but it certainly deserves a place in the running for most underrated. Two important considerations below:

Even among the plays that deal with war, it stands out as action-packed.

We open with conflict with the Volscians, and we get more large-scale battles and skirmishes throughout. More importantly, we have a Star Wars-esque battle between two rivals (Aufidius on the Volscian side and Caius Marcius/Coriolanus on the other) who do everything good rivals should do:

• They fight with their armies
• They have a one-on-one duel that ends in a stalemate
• They swear to kill each other if it’s the last thing they ever do
• They undergo an improbable reconciliation, each taking a leap of faith on the other’s worthiness of partnership
• They advance against a common enemy
• They end the partnership in betrayal, as prior allegiances prove too strong to overcome
• Finally, they fight to the death with civilization itself hanging in the balance

It is, politically, Shakespeare’s most complex play.

Most Shakespeare plays about government have a surface-level reading (e.g., tyranny is evil and must be met with decisive courage) and a Straussian reading (e.g., Brutus was wrong to betray Caesar, who wasn’t that tyrannical in the first place, and perhaps republican ideals are little more than convenient tools in the hands of other tyrants). Many of Shakespeare’s political dramas, especially those dealing with the history of England, seem to work on both a pro-monarchy level and a more subversive level.

Coriolanus is the protean shapeshifter of political dramas. I found myself, at times, sympathizing with the plebeians, who were clearly right to believe that Coriolanus cared nothing for them. And yet, their disdain for him is not based on an assertion of their sovereignty but rather on their susceptibility to the rhetoric of the tribunes.

As with all crowds, their rash leaps to judgment and their fickle oscillations eventually sour our sympathy. The fault, it seems, is not in the forces acting on the crowd but rather in the crowd as such.

Act II, Scene III gives us an all-too-human peek behind the veil of the crowd. Three citizens in the Forum discuss what is to be done about Coriolanus, and the conversation is rife with defeatism uncannily reminiscent of much recent American political discourse: no one seems to feel they have the upper hand. We see the paradox of democracy—that a crowd of free individuals, once assembled, find themselves strangely unfree. With sovereignty so thinly dispersed, the citizens find it difficult to issue a verdict, or to uphold it:

We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do […] We have been called [a multitude] of many; not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured: and truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points o’ the compass.

—Act II, Scene III, 4-26

The tribunes themselves seem like power-hungry charlatans behind closed doors and therefore come off as unsympathetic despite being nominally on the side of “the people.” The conflict with Coriolanus is, for them, personal in nature and political only by necessity. They correctly identify him as an easy mark in the realm of popular opinion, and they seize the first opportunity to use his political ineptitude to consolidate their own power.

Even Coriolanus himself, we feel, has been wronged. Of course, there is his mother, who has clearly done a number on him since birth. The play makes it clear that his disdain for the plebeians is an idea she instilled in him early on.

But even if we hold him accountable in his adulthood for overcoming the prejudices of his upbringing, we still feel he was somehow trapped. What he lacks as a politician in social graces and maturity, he makes up for in self-awareness. He repeatedly begs his mother and Menenius not to force him into situations where he is sure to cause trouble:

I do beseech you,
Let me o’erleap that custom, for I cannot
Put on the gown, stand naked and entreat them,
For my wounds’ sake, to give their suffrage: please you
That I may pass this doing.

—Act II, Scene II, 139-143

And again:

Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.

—Act III, Scene II, 14-16

Even the consul of Rome, it seems, is not sovereign over himself. Coriolanus sees the coming tragedy, but he is not free to avoid it. As Bloom puts it:

Still, he is more his own enemy than he is theirs, and his tragedy is not the consequence of their fear and anger, but of his own nature and nurture.

(Bloom, 578)

If there is a single uncontradicted political moral in Coriolanus, it is precisely that the acquisition of political power—be it by a general, a tribune, or a crowd—requires a certain abdication of personal sovereignty.

We get a sense of this trade-off in Antony and Cleopatra, when both characters have made their lives so large that they have become the states of Rome and Egypt, bound by duty and honor, and cease entirely to be free individuals. But in Coriolanus we see this problem obtains at all levels of political organization. Nobody is happy, and no one feels themselves to be “in charge.” We come away less with disdain for any particular form of government than for the entire process of governance in general.

There are many more reasons to love the play, and the Bloom essay is one of his best so far. Much of the political tone feels salient today, and the characters are weak but memorable. Coupled with its meager (nonexistent?) reputation outside of academia, it is certainly underrated and worthy of my recommendation.

Rating: 8.5/10