Pride, the first of the seven deadly sins, is the more overmastering in Coriolanus from his freedom from the rest, unless wrath be excepted. He is without envy, perhaps because he has no rivals, for, fair opposite as he is, he hardly endures the quality of Aufidius; but his pride in his valiant manhood, though its praises grieve him, will brook no question, and becomes pitiful when he allows the taunt of "boy," not traitor this time, to make him insult his hosts and brag of his exploits in Antium. To be called traitor he could bear; he knew his actions might be called in question; but Aufidius burlesqued his emotion and its effect on others, and called him a "boy of tears." It was too much. He forgets the traitor, even the tears, but "boy!" The word might almost echo him: "Alone I did it.”

In framing the plot from the story in Plutarch, Shakespeare reduced three rebellious commotions to two. The first, which led to the appointment of the tribunes, was apparently pacified by Menenius, who only addresses the least important of two bodies of citizens in Shakespeare. The second, omitted by Shakespeare, was brought about principally by the tribunes by means of false tales, and was augmented by the attempt of the nobility to thin the ranks of the discontented by sending a colony to the plague-stricken town Velitrae, and to levy troops to proceed against the Volscians. The tribunes insinuated that the patricians had procured a voluntary war, and the people refused to serve. Marcius compelled them to colonise Velitrae, but proceeded to the wars with volunteers only, and as the result of his foray brought back plenty of corn and booty, which was distributed to the volunteers alone. At this stage, the proposal to confer the consulship was made, and at first favourably received by the people because of Marcius's services; but on second thoughts they refused it. It was after this that by purchase and gift Rome was well provided with corn, and Marcius, embittered by his rejection, and indignant at the people's refusal to serve, and more than ever convinced of the folly of dividing authority, not only declaimed against easy sale or gift of corn but urged the abolition of the tribuneship and carried the majority of the senators with him. Upon this the tribunes flew to the people, "crying out for help," and raised a tumult. They attempted to arrest Coriolanus and proceeded as in Shakespeare. This was the third sedition or tumult.

In altering the facts, Shakespeare does more than improve

the story from the dramatic point of view. He suppresses some of the machinations of the tribunes, but makes them responsible for the refusal of the consulship, and in creating live characters out of Plutarch's authors of sedition, makes them base, self-seeking and unscrupulous. Yet he sees to it that they put the people's just case forcibly, and makes them utter home-truths to the proud patrician :

you speak to the people

As if you were a god to punish, not

A man of their infirmity.

He gives the people more excuse for their fickleness, by making Marcius refuse to show his wounds and meet their good-will with ungenerous sneers. Their natural kindliness and pathetic readiness to forgive is not forgotten, but, on the other hand, their sufferings and forbearance are less advanced, and justice is hardly done to their provocations, methods and moderation. Their ignorance and self-contradiction, as Shakespeare paints it, help to intensify their fickleness, and their enthusiasm for the victor Coriolanus shows up their ingratitude in the sequel.

Yet it is not strictly true to say, with Dr. Brandes,1 that Shakespeare ignores "every incident which sheds a favourable light upon the Plebeians," and had his sympathy been wholly with Coriolanus he would have stopped short of making any part of his conduct odious. Advocacy of his point of view is not implied in making the people fickle and fusty, nor yet morbid hyper-sensitiveness on the latter score. Shakespeare was far too sensible of the humourous possibilities of the outraged sense to be turned into a misanthrope, or of being made "incapable of seeing them [the people] as an aggregation of separate individualities," as Dr. Brandes will have it,2 by even "the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril." No doubt he preferred a strong, unhampered government; no doubt he disliked the mob on its bad, fickle, and dangerous side, and made the most of what was objectionable in it to nice senses, which is no more than what any student of his period ought to expect; but that he could not or would not see the people's rights, their good side, and even their individual good sense, can only be denied by ignoring probability and reading the evidence of his work, including Coriolanus, all wrong. It would be better to take the opposite

view with Mr. Stopford Brooke, who says: "We are made to feel, moving like a spirit through the play, the sympathy of Shakespeare with the struggle of the people," and again: "Then, too, the drawing of Coriolanus suggests his sympathy with the popular movement. No one can help seeing that Shakespeare did not love Coriolanus, nor approve his conduct." The mob does not devour aristocracy, the rule of those who are best, or vileness triumph over nobility, as Mr. Barrett Wendell1 puts it. The people expels by fair and foul means, a declared enemy whom sane aristocracy cannot control, and even Menenius admits that in the event all is well (IV. vi. 16). That Coriolanus subverts this condition by resorting to foul means himself does not change the fact.

Cominius and Titus Lartius are scarcely more than brave soldiers, generous comrades, and men of sense and prudence in the State, but Shakespeare has created in Menenius one of the happy old men of Elizabethan or Jacobean drama out of a mere name in Plutarch. Menenius would have been a witty compotator with Justice Clement, or old Merrythought, or Sebastian in Monsieur Thomas, but has his serious sides in his devotion to Coriolanus and the shrewdness, and-at the lowest estimate the bonhomie, which creates an impression of goodwill and makes the people hear him and endure his plainest speech. He and his fellow patricians share the aristocratic prejudices of Coriolanus, but not in the exaggerated degree which destroys all human feeling; and as the people credited him with love for them and honesty, it is a fair inference that they remembered instances either of particular kindness or of political impartiality. Mr. E. K. Chambers denies him diplomacy save in his own conceit, and will have him foolish and ineffective, but it is he who does all that can be done from the patrician side to control events in the hour of danger, who calls for force against force when nothing else will serve, and who afterwards succeeds in restoring the situation to a possibility of compromise.

He is an altogether happy creation; and it is only when we come to Aufidius that disappointment in the characterisation is really felt. In Plutarch, Aufidius is not introduced until Coriolanus seeks him at Antium, when he is described as rich, noble, and valiant, honoured among the Volsces as a king, and as hating and envying Marcius because of their many encounters. Yet it is as "a man of great mind" that 1 William Shakespeare: A Study in Elizabethan Literature, 1894.

Coriolanus seeks him out, and as one most desirous of the Volscians to have revenge upon the Romans, and Aufidius is "a marvellous glad man' to hear him, and taking him by the hand, says: "Stand up, O Marcius, and be of good cheer, for in proffering thyself unto us thou dost us great honour; and by this means thou mayest hope of greater things at all the Volsces' hands." In Shakespeare, Aufidius appears early in the play, and the two men admire the qualities in one another which they value in themselves, but reciprocally hate and envy because each is too proud to brook a rival. Of the two, only Marcius speaks generously of his competitor, and Shakespeare makes Aufidius, when again defeated, disclaim honour henceforward and vow revenge by base means. Yet when Coriolanus seeks him, a rapturous speech replaces the few words of welcome in Plutarch, and it is impossible to think it insincere. ✔Aufidius is one of those who can feel and obey a noble and generous impulse, but cannot resist reaction when the impulse fades and its consequences begin to be unacceptable. "Though he had received no private injury or displeasure of Marcius," says Plutarch, "yet the common fault and imperfection of man's nature wrought in him, and it grieved him to see his own reputation blemished through Marcius' great fame and honour, and so himself to be less esteemed of the Volsces than he was before." This is natural even in a true man, and in Shakespeare, if we may trust Aufidius, and the First Conspirator in v. vi., he experienced something too proud in the bearing of Coriolanus towards him, which added to his resentment. But dishonourably and unlike a true man, with a face of friendship to his colleague, he basely plots against him, and declaring himself moved by the appeal of Volumnia, is quite unmoved by that of Coriolanus: "Stand to me in this cause."

In the early rivalry Shakespeare represented his honour as perishing in the gall of repeated defeat; so now, as in Plutarch also, the honour of a comrade and host withers in the hot resentment of a displaced leader. When he has destroyed his rival, he cries, "My rage is gone And I am struck with sorrow.' It is a revulsion of feeling which cannot conciliate, but I do not think it was intended to be insincere. On the whole, Aufidius can be understood as well as despised; but the delineation of the character does not satisfy, and leaves the impression of an unpleasing task, accomplished with as little trouble as possible. It is in contrast with the careful presentation of the tribunes.

Of the three noble ladies, the wife is merely mentioned in Plutarch, without description, and it is Shakespeare who has created Coriolanus's "gracious silence," the tender-hearted Virgilia. She is a companion picture to Antony's Octavia, and small as is her part in the play, is well defined in her love and gentleness, in which injury to those she loves can yet awake fierceness, and in her resolution. Valeria, in Plutarch, makes her only appearance as the instigator of the female appeal to the victor, and the lead in that is soon taken by Volumnia; so that the lively friend and chronicler of the exploits of little Marcius is again the creation of the poet, who receives only from his source her sisterhood to Publicola and high character for modesty and wisdom. He has again greatly developed the character of Volumnia from what he found in Plutarch, where there is no indication of its harsher side and the only reflection upon it is that implied in the evils arising to Coriolanus from the loss of his father.

Plutarch's Volumnia is the cause of her son's love of honour, the mother for whose delight he sought always to win the garland of the war, "that she might still embrace him with tears running down her cheeks for joy." There is no hint of the forcefulness of her character and tinge of ferocity in her exultation that we see in the play, nor any of those traits which, as Mr. MacCallum has well pointed out, are not such as a poet would imagine for an ideal portrait of his own mother. Dr. Brandes's notion of such portraiture has been alluded to in this introduction in connection with the question of date. She is not expressly made responsible for the moulding of her son's character, and does not intervene with superior sagacity and prudence to induce him to soothe the people with humble words on his lips, belying the scorn and hatred in his heart. In his misfortune she is coupled with his wife in abandonment to sorrow, weeping and shrieking with her as he bids goodbye, but in the climax of Rome's and her son's fate, she sinks the mother in the Roman and displays an unselfish devotion to her country far above his once lauded patriotism. Shakespeare has but added touches to her noble pleading, and has not broken her still nobler silence. She saves her son from a great crime, and not solely by her sway over him and the inability to resist her which determined his course on a former occasion. Then his heart and judgment were against her, now only his vow and injured pride. The tender side of his nature is stirred to its depths, and his eyes