It will be allowed that from the example of Brutus many more would be won over to the cause of the people, than would be won over to aristocratic principles by Coriolanus.
Quite apart from the final apostasy he strikes the unprejudiced reader as an example to eschew rather than to imitate. Charlotte Brontë, not a Shakespearian scholar but a woman of no less common sense than genius, gives the natural interpretation of his career in the passage I have already referred to. After Caroline and Moore have finished the play, she makes the former ask concerning the hero:
“Was he not faulty as well as great?”
Moore nodded.
“And what was his fault? What made him hated by the citizens? What caused him to be banished by his countrymen?”
She answers her own question by quoting Aufidius’ estimate, and proceeds:
“And you must not be proud to your work people; you must not neglect the chance of soothing them; and you must not be of an inflexible nature, uttering a request as austerely as if it were a command.”
That, so far as it goes, is a quite legitimate “moral” to draw from the story; and it is the obvious one.
How then does Shakespeare conceive the political situation? On the one side there is a despised and famished populace, driven by its misery to demand powers in the state that it cannot wisely use, and trusting to leaders that are worse than itself. On the other side there is a prejudiced aristocracy, numbering competent men in its ranks, but disorganised and, to some extent, demoralised by plebeian encroachments, so that it can no longer act with its old efficiency and consistency. And there is one great aristocrat, pre-eminently consistent and efficient, but whose greatness becomes mischievous to himself and others, partly because it is out of harmony with the times, partly because it is corrupted by his inordinate pride. And to all these persons, or groups of persons, Shakespeare’s attitude, as we shall see, is at once critical and sympathetic. Admitting the conditions, we can only agree with Coleridge’s verdict: “This play illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakespeare’s politics.[241] And there is no reason why the conditions should not be admitted. It is easy to imagine a society in which the masses are not yet ripe for self-government, and in which the classes are no longer able to steer the state, while a gifted and bigoted champion of tradition only makes matters worse. Indeed, something similar has been exemplified in history oftener than once or twice. Whether in point of fact Shakespeare’s conception is correct for the particular set of circumstances he describes is quite another question, that concerns neither the excellence of Coriolanus as a drama nor the fairness of its political views, but solely its fidelity to antiquarian truth and the accuracy of its antiquarian data.”
Clearly it was impossible for Shakespeare to revive the spirit of the times in Coriolanus, even to the extent that he had done so in Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, for the simple reason that in them, with whatever trespasses into fiction on the part of himself or his authority, he was following the record of what had actually taken place, while now he was dealing with a legend that seems to have the less foundation in fact the more it is examined. The tribunate, with the establishment of which the whole action begins, the opposition to which by Marcius is his main offence, and the occupants of which play so important a part in the proceedings, is now generally held to be of much later origin than the supposed date of the story. There is no agreement as to the names of the chief persons; Coriolanus is Cneius or Caius, his mother is Veturia or Volumnia, his wife is Volumnia or Vergilia, the Volscian leader Tullus Aufidius or Amfidius or Attius Tullius. Even the appellation Coriolanus rouses suspicion, for the bestowal of such titles seems to have been unknown till long afterwards, and, in the view of some, points not to conquest but to origin; and there are contradictory accounts of the hero’s end. It has been conjectured[242] that the whole story arose in connection with religious observances and contains a large mythological admixture; and we may remember how at the end it is associated with the erection of the temple to Fortuna Muliebris.