Or again the contemptuous descriptions of the people by Octavius, Cleopatra and Antony himself have been treated as preludes to the more savage vituperations in Coriolanus. But Julius Caesar gives an equally unflattering account of mob law, and some of Casca’s gibes would quite fit the mouth of Coriolanus or Menenius. On these lines we should be as much entitled to make this play the direct successor of the first as of the second of its companions, a theory that would meet with scant acceptance. The truth is that whenever Shakespeare deals with the populace, he finds some one to disparage it in the mass.
Still there is little doubt that Coriolanus does occupy the position these arguments would assign to it, but the real evidence is of another kind. To begin with there is what Coleridge describes in Antony and Cleopatra as the “happy valiancy of style,” which first becomes marked in that play, which is continued in this, and which henceforth in a greater or less degree characterises all Shakespeare’s work. Then even more conclusive are the peculiarities of metre, and especially the increase in the total of weak and light endings together with the decrease of the light by themselves. Finally, there is the conduct of the story to a conclusion that proposes no enigma and inflicts no pang, but even more than in the case of Macbeth satisfies, and even more than in the case of Antony and Cleopatra uplifts the heart, without troublesome questionings on the part of the reader. “As we close the book,” says Mr. Bradley, “we feel more as we do at the close of Cymbeline than as we do at the close of Othello.” We cannot be far wrong in placing it in the last months of 1608 or the first months of 1609.
Attempts have been made to find suggestions of a personal kind for Shakespeare’s choice of the subject. The extreme ease with which they have been discovered for the various dates proposed may well teach us caution. Thus Professor Brandl who assigns it an earlier position than most critics and discusses it before Lear sees in it the outcome of events that occurred in the first years of the century.
The material for Coriolanus was perhaps put in Shakespeare’s way by a contemporary tragedy which keenly excited the Londoners, and especially the courtly and literary circles, about 1603 and 1604. Sir Walter Raleigh had been one of the most splendid gentlemen at the court of Elizabeth, was a friend of Spenser and Ben Jonson, had himself tried his hand at lyric poetry, and in addition as adventurous officer had discovered Virginia and annexed Guiana. He was the most highly considered but also the best hated man in England: for his behaviour was domineering, in the consciousness of his innate efficiency he showed without disguise his contempt for the multitude, the farm of wine-licenses granted him by the Queen had made him objectionable to the pothouse politicians, and his opposition in parliament to a bill for cheapening corn had recently drawn on him new unpopularity. He, therefore, shortly after the accession of James succumbed to the charge, that he, the scarred veteran of the Spanish wars, the zealous advocate of new expeditions against Spain, had involved himself in treasonous transactions with this, the hereditary foe of England. In November 1603 the man who had won treasure-fleets and vast regions for his country, almost fell a victim to popular rage as he was being transferred from one prison to another.[234] A month later he was condemned to death on wretched evidence: he was not yet executed however but locked up in the Tower, so that men were in suspense as to his fate for many years. To depict his character his biographer Edwards involuntarily hit on some lines of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The figure of the Roman, who had deserved well but incurred hatred, of the patriot whom his aristocratic convictions drive to the enemy, was already familiar to the dramatist from North’s translation of Plutarch; and Camden’s Remaines concerning Britaine, which had newly appeared in 1605 contributed a more detailed version of the fable of the belly and the members, first set forth by Livy. From this mood and about this time Coriolanus, for the dating of which only the very relative evidence of metre and style is available, may most probably have proceeded.[235]
In this passage, Professor Brandl has brought out some of the considerations that would lend the case of Raleigh a peculiar interest in the eyes of men like Shakespeare, and has made the most of the parallels between his story and the story of Coriolanus.[236] It is necessary of course to look away from almost all the points except those enumerated, for when we remember Sir Walter’s robust adulation of Elizabeth, and tortuous policy at court, it is difficult to pair him with the Roman who “would not flatter Neptune for his trident,” and of whom it was said, “his heart’s his mouth.” Still the analogies in career and character are there, so far as they go; but they are insufficient to prove that the actual suggested the poetical tragedy, still less to override the internal evidence, relative though that be; for they could linger and germinate in the poet’s mind to bring forth fruit long afterwards: as for example the treason and execution of Biron in 1602 inspired Chapman to write The Conspiracie and The Tragedie which were acted in 1608.
Again, in connection with what seems to be the actual date, an attempt has been made to explain one prominent characteristic of the play from a domestic experience through which Shakespeare had just passed. His mother died in September 1608, and her memory is supposed to be enshrined in the picture of Volumnia. As Dr. Brandes puts it:[237]
The death of a mother is always a mournfully irreparable loss, often the saddest a man can sustain. We can realise how deeply it would go to Shakespeare’s heart when we remember the capacity for profound and passionate feeling with which nature had blessed and cursed him. We know little of his mother; but judging from that affinity which generally exists between famous sons and their mothers, we may suppose she was no ordinary woman. Mary Arden, who belonged to an old and honourable family, which traced its descent (perhaps justly) back to the days of Edward the Confessor, represented the haughty patrician element in the Shakespeare family. Her ancestors had borne their coat of arms for centuries, and the son would be proud of his mother for this among other reasons, just as the mother would be proud of her son. In the midst of the prevailing gloom and bitterness of his spirits,[238] this fresh blow fell upon him, and out of his weariness of life as his surroundings and experiences showed it to him, recalled this one mainstay to him—his mother. He remembered all she had been to him for forty-four years, and the thoughts of the man and the dreams of the poet were thus led to dwell upon the significance in a man’s life of this unique form, comparable to no other—his mother. Thus it was that, although his genius must follow the path it had entered upon and pursue it to the end, we find, in the midst of all that was low and base in his next work, this one sublime mother-form, the proudest and most highly-wrought that he has drawn, Volumnia.
Thus Shakespeare, in a mood of pessimism, and in the desolation of bereavement, turned to a subject that he treated on its seamy side, but redeemed from its meanness by exalting the idea of the mother in obedience to his own pious regrets. Even, however, if we grant the assumptions in regard to Mary Arden’s pedigree and her aristocratic family pride, and the unique support she gave to her son, does this statement give a true account of the impression the play produces? Is it the fact that, apart from the figure of Volumnia, the story is “low and base,” and is it not rather the record of grand though perverted heroism? Is it the fact that Volumnia stands out as a study of motherhood, such as the first heartache at a mother’s death would inspire? The most sympathetic traits in her portrait are drawn by Plutarch. Shakespeare’s many touches supply the harshness, the ambition, the prejudice. If these additions are due to Shakespeare’s wistful broodings on his own mother, a woman with a son of genius may well hope that he will never brood on her.
Then, especially by those who advocate a later date for the play, a political motive for it has been discovered. Mr. Whitelaw, who would assign it to 1610, when James’s first parliament was dissolved, conjectures that “in Coriolanus Shakespeare intended a two-fold warning, to the pride of James, and to the gathering resistance of the Commons.”[239] Mr. Garnett,[240] on the other hand, maintains that “Coriolanus, to our apprehension, manifestly reflects the feelings of a conservative observer of the contests between James and his refractory parliaments,” and placing it after the Tempest, would connect it with the dissolution of the Addled Parliament in 1614. But since the friction between King and Commons, though it intensified with the years, was seldom entirely absent, this theory adapts itself pretty well to any date, and Dr. Brandes, while refusing to trace the spirit of the play to any “momentary political situation,” adopts the general principle as quite compatible with the state of affairs in 1608. He puts the case as follows:
Was it Shakespeare’s intention to allude to the strained relations existing between James and his parliament? Does Coriolanus represent an aristocratically-minded poet’s side-glance at the political situation in England? I fancy it does. Heaven knows there was little resemblance between the amazingly craven and vacillating James and the haughty, resolute hero of Roman tradition, who fought a whole garrison single-handed. Nor was it personal resemblance which suggested the comparison, but a general conception of the situation as between a beneficent power on the one hand, and the people on the other. He regarded the latter wholly as mob, and looked upon their struggle for freedom as mutiny, pure and simple.