If, then, he is speaking honestly in this scene, how are we to account for his change of purpose when we next meet him a renegade in Antium? No explanation was needed in Plutarch, for the circumstances were not quite the same. There he had only not resolved to join the enemy; here he apparently has resolved to do something else. In the Life after leaving the city he merely comes to a decision, in the play he reverses the decision he has formed. So some statement is needed of the cause for the alteration of his plans, and at first sight there seems to be none. Yet there is a hint and a fairly emphatic one, though it has not been worked out; a hint, moreover, which is the more significant that it is one of Shakespeare’s interpolations.
When the sentence of banishment is pronounced and Coriolanus has retired to his house, there follows a passage which has no parallel or foundation in Plutarch. It is the one already referred to in another connection in which Sicinius gives his mean and malicious order to the people:
Go, see him out at gates, and follow him,
As he hath follow’d you, with all despite:
Give him deserved vexation.
(iII. iii. 138.)
And the citizens promptly agree:
Come, come; let’s see him out at gates; come.
(iII. iii. 141.)
This is at the very close of the Third Act, and the Fourth Act begins in “Rome, before a gate of the city” with the scene of leave-taking discussed above. We naturally expect that it will be interrupted by the popular demonstrations which the tribunes have contrived, especially as these exist only in Shakespeare’s imagination; but it passes off without any hint of them. Only patrician persons appear by whom Coriolanus is beloved and who are beloved by him: and no hostile murmur jars on the solemnity of their grief. But that does not mean that it may not do so even now. He is not yet beyond the walls, and towards the close bids his friends: “Bring me out at gate”; which, we assume, they do forthwith. There is still time for the plebeians to execute their masters’ orders, and though we witness nothing of the kind, there is no reason to believe that they failed to do so. It is easy to conjecture why Shakespeare thought it unnecessary to present this incident to eye and ear. It would have disturbed the quiet dignity of the parting interview; it would have repeated at a lower pitch, without the accompaniment of suspense, and therefore with the risk of monotony and flatness, the tumultuary motif of preceding scenes. But Shakespeare’s variations from his authority are not idle, and we cannot suppose that the tribune’s direction, though we do not actually see it carried out, was a meaningless tag. There is room enough in the economy of the play for its fulfilment beyond the stage. We may imagine that just as Coriolanus’ friends proceed to “bring him out at gate” the insulting irruption takes place; and in the next scene, “a street near the gate,” we find the tribunes, the work done, dismissing their agents: