Coriolanus
Play
Summary
Caius Martius Coriolanus is Rome's greatest living soldier and the play's tragic hero — a man of absolute courage and absolute rigidity, a warrior so proud he cannot perform the simplest acts of political self-abasement that his city demands of him. He earns his surname by single-handedly storming the gates of Corioli. His aristocratic contempt for the Roman plebeians ("the mutable, rank-scented many") makes him politically toxic, and the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus exploit his inability to dissemble, engineering his banishment. Coriolanus's response — "I banish you!" — is the play's central paradox: he turns his exile into a counter-assertion of self that carries him to Rome's gates at the head of a Volscian army, only for his mother Volumnia's appeal to undo him. His capitulation to her is at once his finest and most fatal moment.
Notable Quotations
"I banish you! / And here remain with your uncertainty! / Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!" *(3.3)*
"There is a world elsewhere." *(3.3)*
"I'll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin." *(5.3)*
"O mother, mother! / What have you done?" *(5.3)*
"Boy! False hound! / If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there / That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I / Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles." *(5.6)*
Cross-references
- Coriolanus — the play
- Tragedies
- character_volumnia — his formidable mother, who shapes and then breaks him
- character_menenius — his patrician friend and would-be mediator
- character_aufidius — his lifelong rival and ultimate killer
- character_sicinius — tribune who engineers his banishment
- character_brutus_coriolanus — the other tribune who works against him
- character_cominius — his commanding general