Towards Giving Coriolanus His Due

by Evelyn Hooven (March 2025)

After the entrance of Coriolanus in the play’s final scene, what happens between him and his adversary Aufidius is less a confrontation than a systematic destruction that extends past death. Even a noble remembrance is denied him. Aufidius’ mandated epitaph is at the verge of provocative. Its double-talk is reminiscent of King Claudius of Denmark’s urging that mourning for King Hamlet, the brother he murdered, occur with an auspicious and a drooping eye, assuming that faced with an event of magnitude, one can adaptively divide oneself into convenient sections.

Though in this city he
Hath widow’d and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.
Assist.

This, rather than any grand finale, is the play’s close. It may be that some of the pyrotechnical theatrics in modern productions are attempts to embellish, to compensate for the plainness of the final lines—muted and declarative, though insinuating.

If catharsis is to occur, there is plenty to fear. Pity is another matter. There is no obligation to offer it to Coriolanus merely to comply with the protocol of catharsis. But the dramatic weight does invite, even compel it.

After the costly process of putting aside provoked and valid retribution by halting wars against the city of Rome whose armed defender he has been since adolescence and which banished him on threat of death, he has framed a peace accord. He has done so duly registering it with the senate – an attention to requisite, public detail which suggests an evolving maturity absent when he stood for Roman consul. And his entry with commoners implies for this patrician warrior that the compassion for kin that moved him to tears and to reversal may be extending to others whom war places in harm’s way. He has never been so fit for statesmanship as when he himself is made vulnerable, not solely as a foreigner, but because he is going through a process of inward change.

He is, though, in his adversary’s domain. The Volscian lord’s reminder that Coriolanus is noble and that “his fame folds in the orb of the world” renders no protection. The commoners fade. Aufidius and his conspirators are totally mobilized and able to stir the crowd, evoking past losses and grievances under differing circumstances until they cray out: “Tear him to pieces!” As Aufidius’ conspirators launch their assault, we learn that Coriolanus is unarmed, without his “lawful sword.” He is at the very limit of defenselessness.

Aufidius’ hostility is not discharged by murder. That murder seems to liberate him from surface composure and to release the violence long withheld. He treads on the corpse; the consequence is merely a terse admonition: “Tread not on him.” Privilege and obligation as the one now in highest military command are not revoked. “Mourn you for him” generates the meagre and grudging epitaph that closes the play.

Can Aufidius’ hostility be discharged? In the short-run, perhaps. Hatred on the order of Aufidius’ is not a problem but a curse—the primal elder’s curse.

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus text was revised by the same author, Nahum Tate, who revised King Lear for the stage. Mr. Tate seems to find it his mission to protect the witness from too much sorrow or too much unresolved, malice-based complexity.

Sadly, in our own time, we are aware that the primal elder’s curse—hatred—and its extreme danger persist. Shakespeare seems to warn us through the hate-criminal, Aufidius, and his pseudo-reasoning, eerie normalizations that close the play.

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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

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