MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES

VOLUME XXXVII DECEMBER, 1922

NUMBER 8

THE STRUCTURE OF SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CORIOLANUS

The late Henry N. Hudson was a great admirer of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. He said:

I hold it to be among his greatest triumphs in organization: I cannot point out, I believe no one has pointed out, a single instance where the parts might have been better ordered for the proper effect of the whole;

the unity of impression is literally perfect. In this great point of dramatic architecture, I think it bears the palm clean away from both the other Roman tragedies; and indeed I am not sure but it should be set down as the peer of Othello.1

A German scholar, Heinrich Viehoff, is also positive that no drama of the master is superior to this in artistic completeness and effectiveness.2

Professor MacCallum thinks Coriolanus to be "technically and artistically a more perfect achievement" than either of Shakespeare's previous Roman plays.3

The question naturally arises: how far is the drama indebted to Plutarch for its unity and power? But one has only to read the two accounts side by side to see in what an endless variety of ways Shakespeare has condensed, hastened, unified, intensified, and supplemented the somewhat wandering story of Plutarch. Shakespeare himself is the real source of the intimate, vigorous dramatic. life that permeates the play. He recasts his material more freely here than in Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra. He improves

1 Harvard Shakespeare, Ginn, 1881, Vol. XVIII, p. 180.

2

Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, Iv (1869), pp. 41 f. Shakespeare's Roman Plays, 1910, p. 479.

upon his original in the greater vividness of the characters and in the closeness and skill of the interweaving.

Excepting Coriolanus himself all of the characters in Plutarch's sketch are faint and vague. In Plutarch Menenius does not appear again after telling the fable of the belly and the members. The tribunes disappear after Marcius is banished. Aufidius is not mentioned until Marcius goes to his house, and is not present at the great scene between Coriolanus and his mother. Volumnia has nothing to do with the suit of Marcius for the consulship; and his solicitation for that office is not brought into any connection either with the war against the Volscians or with the banishment of the hero."

That the speech in which Coriolanus announces himself to Aufidius follows Plutarch closely, and that "nowhere has Shakespeare borrowed so much through so great a number of lines as in Volumnia's appeal to the piety of her son" are facts which easily mislead one as to the extent of the poet's indebtedness to his source. And the telling close of Volumnia's plea, which finally overpowers the hero, is new to Shakespeare:

Come, let us go.

This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;

His wife is in Corioli, and his child

Like him by chance.-Yet give us our dispatch.

I am hush'd until our city be a-fire,
And then I'll speak a little.

(V, iii, 177-182.)

I must admit that the play seems to me defective at one point. In Plutarch the opportune and skillful recounting of the fable of the belly and the members by Menenius causes the plebeians to become reconciled to the patricians on condition that the people be granted tribunes with ample power. In the play, while Menenius is talking to one body of plebeians, another company obtains from the hostile patricians the concession that they may have tribunes to protect them. This granting of tribunes has no natural

Delius has presented in some detail the relation of the play to the source in Abhandlungen zu Shakspere, 1889, 1, 388-416. Reprinted from the Jahrbuch for 1876. See also the work of MacCallum.

MacCallum. p. 484.

relation to the bread-riot which Shakespeare has depicted. The populace "ask for bread and get a magistrate." Shakespeare makes the colloquy between Menenius and his audience supremely vivid and interesting. Hardly any serio-comic passage in the plays reads better. But because it is not made causative in any way, super-excellent as it is in itself, it is good for nothing. Surely this is an artistic mistake, an unfortunate alteration of the story of Plutarch.

8

The play has been criticized at another point. Coleridge felt that the treacherous Aufidius of 1, x, who longs to wash his fierce hand in the heart of Caius Marcius, and the hospitable Aufidius, who welcomes to Antium his former enemy (IV, v), cannot be the same person. I do not recognize any inconsistency here. The impulsive warmth with which the Volscian leader receives Coriolanus is natural enough, but it represents an attitude that cannot endure, both men being what they are. However, a recent scholarly study of the play seeks to explain how Shakespeare came to portray "two Aufidiuses," and makes this comment:

Aufidius is the weak point of the play. Dramatically, his function is to play in the second part of the play the rôle held by Sicinius and Brutus, the Tribunes, in the first, but to play it with more steadiness of hatred even than they, because Aufidius has to accomplish Coriolanus's death, while the Tribunes need only his exile. But whereas the Tribunes play the part to the life, . . . Aufidius is as impulsive as Coriolanus himself, and as evidently incapable of plotting as he. Instead of being plainer to us than Sicinius and Brutus, he becomes ten times as shadowy."

I will call attention here to the whole-souled sympathy of approbation which the late Professor Barrett Wendell bestowed upon the character of Coriolanus. I quote a few expressions:

The people,.. that great underlying mass of humanity. . . is presented in Coriolanus with ultimate precision. . . . The fate of Coriolanus comes from no decadence, no corruption, no vicious weakness, but rather from a passionate excess of inherently noble traits, whose very nobility unfits them for survival in the ignoble world about them. . . . In Coriolanus we find Shakspere, with almost cynical coldness, artistically

Coriolanus," The London Times Literary Supplement, July 27. 1922,

expounding the inherent weakness of moral nobility, the inherent strength and power of all that is intellectually and morally vile.

It makes one rub one's eyes to read such an estimate of the proud, intractable, passionate, self-destroyed Coriolanus.

Gustav Freytag pointed out that tragedies naturally fall into two classes. In one class, the action is initiated by the central figure, the hero; in the other type, some great opponent of the hero is the initiating agent, or some group of opponents.11

us call these two contrasted kinds of tragedy the Macbeth type and the Othello type.

Each of these kinds has a characteristic danger. In a tragedy of the Macbeth type, the usual kind, the resolution or fall of the action, previous to the actual catastrophe, is apt to be somewhat distracting and lacking in interest. In general, we may say that the fourth act is likely to prove comparatively weak. Let us look into the reasons for this.

During the first part of Macbeth, or any play of that class, the hero monopolizes our interest. We see him boldly assert himself and reach out after some coveted prize; and our sympathy goes out to this challenging, aggressive leader. But at last he takes some fatal step, and we feel that his ruin has begun. The opposition to the hero, the counterplay, must now take the lead, since it is destined to destroy him. This opposition may have several leaders, such as Malcolm, Macduff, and the other nobles in Macbeth. Some of these leaders are likely to be almost new; none of them interests us in comparison with the great hero; and their number cannot compensate for their relative insignificance. The slow defeat of the hero is an unpleasant spectacle, and we have not yet reached the compensating intensity of the tragic close. Because the opposition now claims our attention, the leading character is apt to be absent from the stage for a time. In Macbeth the play travels off to England for a disproportionately long scene, and the hero is neglected: Hamlet is sent away to England, while the foreground is filled with the plotting of the King and Laertes,

10 William Shakspere, 1894, pp. 329, 330, 334. I have been much helped by this stimulating book, though here disagreeing with it.

Die Technik des Dramas, 7te Aufl., Leipzig. 1894. pp. 93 ff. In the Eng. translation, Chicago, 2d ed. 1896, pp. 104 ff.

and with the pathetic ravings of Ophelia; in Julius Caesar Antony and Octavius are in power.

Indeed, the resolution of any play is apt to be somewhat lacking in interest, because of the fact that the outcome of the play has by this time been pretty clearly indicated and prepared for. All of us have something of the interest of a child or of an untrained spectator in the mere going on of the story, in the question how the affair will turn out; and, however well known the play is, we all take the point of view of one hearing it for the first time. The play loses something of its zest and charm when the progress of the action indicates plainly what the outcome will be. Especially in a great tragedy, the catastrophe has been clearly pointed out and arranged for by the time the fourth act is well under way. At this point, therefore, the audience is naturally disposed to dulness and lack of interest.

It is evident that tragedies of the type of Othello have an advantage at this stage of the action where tragedies of the Macbeth type are in danger. The action of Othello really begins with the plot of Iago against Othello and Desdemona, at the close of the first act; and from this point on that villain manages everything, while the Moor is the unsuspecting victim of his wiles. In the great third scene of Act III, Iago convinces the hero of the guilt of Desdemona. Othello, roused to fury, calls forth our most intense interest and compassion as he storms on toward the doom that awaits him. We are deeply stirred with sympathy during just that stage of the action which in Macbeth and similar tragedies tends to be distracting and weak.

Freytag says of tragedies of the Othello type:

It might appear that this method of dramatic construction must be the more effective. Gradually, in a specially careful presentation, one sees the conflicts through which the life of the hero is disturbed give direction to the hidden forces of his nature. Just there, where the hearer demands a powerful intensifying of effects, the previously prepared leadership of the chief characters begins; suspense and sympathy, which are more difficult to sustain in the last half of the play, are firmly fixed upon the chief characters; the stormy and irresistible progress downward to destruction is particularly favorable to powerful and thrilling effects."

There is one portion of tragedies of the Othello type, however, which it is hard to make successful, and that is the complication,

P. 96; in the translation (not followed here), p. 108.