CORIOLANUS, ARISTOTLE, AND BACON

Abstract

T is the suggestion, in the first place, of this article that manifested in Coriolanus is a distinct assimilation of certain passages in the Politics of Aristotle; and, in view particularly of T. W. Baldwin's recent writings on Shakespeare's 'small Latin and less Greek', that this is most probably traceable to the first English translation of that work, printed in London in 1598.' What I shall be drawing attention to will not be Aristotelian sententiae modified by Shakespeare's individual vocabulary and rhythmic dramatic utterance and spoken by his characters, but certain fundamental ideas which I suspect to have implanted themselves in Shakespeare's mind, to emerge on the right occasion in characteristic imaginative form. The expression given to these in the 1598 edition is, I believe, such that, even on a rapid flipping over of the pages, they could well be attracted into an alert and active imagination, to join or await material and attitudes springing from other reading or experience. I should hesitate long before trying to decide whether the elements I claim to be Aristotelian preceded, followed, or otherwise mingled with the Plutarchian ones; but I suggest that they played a part with them in the imaginative process akin to a chemical reaction which produced Shakespeare's version of the Coriolanus story. The relationship that I believe to have existed may, that is, be one of considerable complexity and no more precisely traceable than most processes of an imagination that amalgamates, not merely records, impressions. In order to establish a resemblance between two objects it is as well for all concerned to be looking at them from the same angle, and as there have been many conflicting accounts of Coriolanus it will be useful to describe briefly the view of it in which affinities with Aristotle are detected. This is that the play exhibits the tragedy of a man of great martial gifts and a lofty but restricted sense of honour, potentially the embodiment of the finest spirit of his society but so crippled by an excess of pride and a pitiful lack of human feeling as to be unfitted for the life of a right social animal. This is the figure in the foreground, the centre-point of our attention, but it is vitally linked with the persons and groups which surround it; and Coriolanus is seen to be in immediate and significant relationship with Volumnia, who, vicariously Amazonian and obsessed by the breeding of an over-specialized warrior-mechanism, monopolizes his attention, to the I Aristotles Politiques, or Discourses of Government. Translated out of Greeke into French, with Expositions taken out of the best Authours.... By Loys Le Roy, called Regius Translated out of French into English. At London printed by Adam Islip Anno Dom: 1598. Translator signs dedicatory epistle 'I. D.'.