And the great warrior and rebel cannot bear her rebuke.
These are instances both of the degree and the manner in which Volumnia’s forceful character influences her son. Indeed it is easy to see that for good and evil he is what she has made him. She is entitled to say:
Thou art my warrior:
I holp to frame thee.
(V. iii. 62.)
And though elsewhere she puts it,
Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’dst from me,
But owe thy pride thyself;
(III. ii. 129.)
the impartial onlooker cannot make the distinction. He is bone of her bone and blood of her blood; and all her master impulses reappear in him, though not so happily commingled or in such beneficent proportion. The joint operation is different and in some respects opposite, but there is hardly a feature in him that cannot be traced to its origin in Volumnia, whether by heredity or education. This is just what we might expect. Modern conjecture points to the mother rather than the father as the source of will-power and character in the offspring; and in the up-bringing of the boy Volumnia has had it all her own way. Plutarch, as we saw, in his simple fashion, notices this as a disadvantage: and though we may be sure that Plutarch’s insinuation of laxity could never be breathed against Shakespeare’s Volumnia, still she could not give her son more width and flexibility than her own narrow and rigid ideals enjoined. Moreover, her limitations when transferred to the larger sphere of his public efforts, would cramp and congest his powers, and displace his interests.