The glasses of my sight! a beggar’s tongue
Make motion through my lips, and my arm’d knees,
Who bow’d but in the stirrup, bend like his
That hath received an alms.
(iII. ii. 110.)
What wonder that his conclusion is to reject such tactics lest they should dishonour his integrity and degrade his soul? His mother’s anger indeed makes him abandon this decision, but his instincts are right. It is a part that of course he could not play under any circumstances, but she has done nothing to show it in its more honourable aspect, and everything to confirm and increase his feeling of its vileness. His sourness and recalcitrance at being false to himself makes him boil over the more fiercely at the first provocation, and all is lost.
It is sometimes said that defeat and the desire for vengeance teach him the lessons which his mother had inculcated in vain, and that henceforth he shows himself a master of dissimulation, flattery, and deception. In proof of this it is usual to cite, in the first place, the farewell scene, when he breathes no word to Cominius, Menenius, Virgilia, or Volumnia of his intention to join the Volscians and return to overthrow Rome. But was any such intention as yet in his mind? In Plutarch he has adopted no definite plan before he sets out. After telling how he comforts his family, the biography proceeds:
He went immediatly to the gate of the cittie, accompanied with a great number of Patricians that brought him thither, from whence he went on his waye with three or foure of his friendes only, taking nothing with him, nor requesting any thing of any man. So he remained a fewe dayes in the countrie at his houses, turmoyled with sundry sortes and kynde of thoughtes, suche as the fyer of his choller dyd sturre up. In the ende, seeing he could resolve no waye, to take a profitable or honorable course, but only was pricked forward still to be revenged of the Romaines, he thought to raise up some great warres against them, by their neerest neighbours.
Of course it is quite true, and it has been one purpose of this essay to show, that Shakespeare often completely recasts Plutarch. But it is also true that, when he does not expressly do so, he often keeps Plutarch’s statements in his mind, even when, as in the case of the voting by tribes, he does not cite them. It counts for something then, that in the Life, Coriolanus on leaving Rome has no fixed purpose of seeking foreign help. And if we turn to the parting scene in the tragedy, and let it make its own impression, without reading into it suggestions from subsequent occurrences, I think we feel not so much that he is still undecided as that the idea has not yet entered into his head. We seem to hear the very accent of sincerity in his repetition of the maxims that erewhile he learned from his mother’s own lips, and that he clinches with the reminder:
You were used to load me