"Beloved of all the trades in Rome": oeconomics, occupation, and the gendered body in Coriolanus.

Jones, Emily Griffiths

From laboring hands and voting tongues to sermonizing bellies, Coriolanus teems with the language of the body politic. In Shakespeare's early republican Rome, various body parts blur the borders of the philosophical, the erotic, and the grotesque, but the play's most challenging corporeal image may in fact be the entire "common body" of the Roman public (2.2.47). (1) The figurative popular "body" pushes against the boundaries of the literal as it breaks down into its constituent parts: tongues, hands, and bellies, to name a few. Moreover, the significance of its being "common" is complicated, as one exchange between Coriolanus and a Citizen suggests: "You have not ... loved the common people," his detractor accuses, to which the hostile hero retorts, "You should account me the more virtuous that I have not been common in my love"--that is, his value is greater because he has not prostituted himself and his services to the general populace (2.3.82-85). Here, as throughout the play, Coriolanus exhibits his penchant for provoking those whom he regards as his inferiors, and he simultaneously defines his social, moral, and sexual status by his fraught relationship to the "common body" of Rome. Both of these elements of Coriolanus's character derive from his belief that the social world is inherently divided into binary oppositions: plebeian versus patrician, noble versus vulgar, and manly versus effeminate, among others. Textual sources for Coriolanus's convictions may be found in classical humanist authorities who were widely read in Shakespeare's day, and Coriolanus channels them in an especially rigid and reductive manner as he struggles to maintain his sense of self as a virtuous aristocrat, a masculine warrior, and a superior Roman citizen, uniquely fit for a privileged position within the commonwealth.

The conflict between each of the facets of Coriolanus's identity comes to a head at the crucial moment when he is compelled by custom--and heavily encouraged by his mother and his patrician friends--to display his war wounds to the Roman people in the marketplace in order to be elected consul. Critical discussions of this marketplace wound display with its accompanying imagery of the body politic typically employ one of two lenses. Many critics have found that the political strife of Shakespeare's Rome serves less to illuminate public concerns than to direct attention to Coriolanus's private anxieties about gender and sexuality. Charles Hofling's claim that "the interest in the drama is attached much more to character than to class" and that "the aspect of the [marketplace] situation which [Coriolanus] finds most intolerable" is "being placed in the passive position" has met with broad assent from later critics, many of whom regard the hero's wounds as a collective anti-phallus. (2) Ralph Berry, for example, suggests that the hurts on Coriolanus's body evoke the unhealed "wounds of adolescence," including the fear of "impotence," and Madelon Sprengnether argues that the hyper-masculine warrior quails at "[exposing] his incompleteness, his implicitly castrated condition." (3)

The second common perspective on Coriolanus adopts an historicist view: a number of scholars who resist the dominant psychoanalytic treatments of the play find that excessive attention to Coriolanus's interiority and sexuality obscures pertinent socioeconomic concerns. Zvi Jagendorf, who calls explicitly for the study of Coriolanus's marketplace crisis "in the light of economics and politics rather than that of gender and psychoanalysis," argues that the aristocratic soldier fights in vain to stem the tide of a surging bourgeois economy in republican Rome (and, by extension, in Jacobean England), championing an impossible "one-man economy that boldly distinguishes itself from the market and the getting, spending, exchanging of ordinary men." Jagendorf's hero "is a pre-economic man" who "fears and hates the market" and "is disgusted by the system of exchange that would convert his deeds in battle into rewards, praise, and, worst of all, votes/voices of the common people." (4) Mark Kishlansky has suggested that the play's contradictory values and "voices" lie "at the core of the process of parliamentary selection" in Jacobean England. (5) Annabel Patterson, stating (opposite to Hofling) that the play's drama is entirely political and offers "nothing of interest" in the psychology of its characters, connects the imagery of the body politic to the 1607 Midlands Revolt and to republican sensibilities stirring in England. (6) Following Patterson, Arthur Riss proposes a link "between the impulse to enclose public land [during the period of the Midlands riots] and Coriolanus's urge to enclose his body, a body that the dominant ideology demands be available for public use." (7) Most recently, Cathy Shrank, building on Leah Marcus and others, has interpreted Coriolanus in relation to the local politics of seventeenth-century English towns and cities. (8)

While there is a clear textual basis both for psychological readings and for historicist arguments that Coriolanus refracts some major early modern cultural shift, it is remarkable that only a few analysts have appreciated the striking correspondences between psychosexual and political or economic approaches to the play. Janet Adelman briefly notes that Coriolanus objects to the wound display because it would both compromise his masculinity and "reveal his kinship with the plebeians ... by revealing that he has worked for hire as they have." (9) Alexander Leggatt traces the patrician hero's socio-sexual downfall in somewhat more detail:

   The fact that the performance has to be given in the market-place
   equates acting with commercial bargaining. Coriolanus is not even a
   gentleman amateur but a tradesman ... doing it for pay. It is a
   small step from that to prostitution.... He imagines himself losing
   his social position, his physical strength, and his sexual
   identity, in a loss of self more specific and detailed than
   anything Antony feared. (10)

Most recently, Russell West-Pavlov has argued that Coriolanus feels his "individualist masculinity" threatened by "a commerce of bodies in which political favours are procured." (11) Yet despite these insights, scholarship on Coriolanus has done little to contend with the pervasive interweaving of socioeconomic and sexual discourses, both throughout the play and in Shakespeare's England.

In a study on male friendship unrelated to Coriolanus, however, Lorna Hutson has revealed the critical contribution of resurrected classical authorities to the early modern discourses of social status and gender in tandem with one another. (12) Some of these classical texts appropriated and appreciated by Tudor humanists suggested significant interrelationship of social rank, occupation, and the gendered body. Sixteenth-century translations of classical authorities such as Aristotle, Xenophon, and Cicero therefore shed new light both on the psychology of Coriolanus as hero and on the sociopolitical context of the play. Seen in relation to these texts, Coriolanus appears neither the victim of psychosexual paranoia, nor fearful of sexual passivity, so much as of actively performing certain occupations. In fact, he operates within an ideological framework that is an assemblage of classical prescriptions for erecting hierarchical divisions between civic and gendered roles. Moreover, Coriolanus is stricter in his values than are his source materials: in him, we see sexual and socioeconomic binaries distilled and reduced to their most uncompromising forms, even as they are losing their hold over the society he inhabits.

Xenophon's Oeconomicus offers an especially pertinent textual nexus from which to measure Coriolanus's tendency toward a reactionary re-reading of aristocratic conduct literature. He is not so much a "pre-economic man" as a man who insists upon the inviolability of his own gendered economic construct, one with roots in the Oeconomicus. Paul Jorgensen has previously proposed that we understand Shakespeare's Coriolanus as a sort of degraded classical humanist for the Jacobean era, one who lacks the complexity and the leadership of his counterpart in North's translation of Plutarch and who tries but fails to embody the ancient and Elizabethan ideal of the harmoniously integrated soldier/statesman (a Philip Sidney, say, or Xenophon's celebrated King Cyrus). (13) Markku Peltonen likewise reminds us of Coriolanus's partial or selective adoption of humanist concepts about rhetoric and civic participation: while his friend Menenius embraces the idea that responsible aristocratic rhetoric may appeal to the populace and promote civic harmony, Coriolanus accepts only the parallel fear of rhetoric as "popular" demagoguery, and so despises it. (14) This, too, is Shakespeare's revision of the historical character: Peltonen points out that in 1576, Abraham Fleming celebrated Coriolanus as an eloquent humanist orator, respected by "Magistrates of eache vocation." (15) Coriolanus's vehement reactions to matters of occupational and bodily identity appear to be selectively derived from the widely read Oeconomicus. Fixated exclusively on dubious dichotomies that allow him to see himself as a singular and superior civic pillar, rather than acknowledging the communitarian goals that accompany these dichotomies in Xenophon's text, Coriolanus operates under an artificially narrow code of behavior that sets him apart from the rest of Rome--including the family and friends who share his patrician status, but not his reductively rigid reading of classical authorities. As Coriolanus strives to re-write Xenophonie principles, he faces the misfortune of having been himself rewritten out of North's Plutarch and into a dramatic Rome that has been recast in relation to the rapidly changing society of Shakespeare's early seventeenth-century England. (16) The worlds of both protagonist and playwright are losing the sharp clarity of boundaries--the Oeconomic divisions between patrician and plebeian status, noble and ignoble occupations, honorable and base bodies, masculine and feminine genders--that Coriolanus requires in order to function. (17)

Starting with Rodney Poisson, commentators have noted Coriolanus's kinship with the "magnanimous man" of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the honorable lover of truth and virtue who scorns vulgarity and vice; John Alvis and Carson Holloway suggest that Coriolanus recalls the magnanimous man while falling tragically short of that ideal. (18) Xenophon's Oeconomicus provides an even stronger frame for Coriolanus's instantiation of humanist exempla in an incomplete, degraded form. He clings to a pseudo-Xenophonic vision of himself as a citizen-soldier who embodies noble and manly occupations while eschewing certain base and emasculating ones; however, his insistence upon his own singularity forces him to disregard the Oeconomicus's more nuanced advocacy for statesmen whose very excellence allows them to be beloved and obeyed as heads of a socially integrated household or state. In imagining a society in which the vast majority of members are thoroughly incapable of virtue and of productive civic participation, Coriolanus erodes his own capacity for effective leadership.

The frame of Xenophon's Oeconomicus is a dialogue between Socrates and an Athenian nobleman, Critobulus, which aims to describe a person who may be esteemed as superior to the rest of society--an ideal member of the elite aristocratic stratum of men honored with the term kalos kagathos. Gentian Hervet's popular sixteenth-century translation renders this compound, literally signifying "beautiful and good," as "good and honest." (19) Hervet's choice of both words is significant. First, like the adjective agathos for the Greeks and the noun virtus for Coriolanus and his Romans, the early modern "honest" bears simultaneous social, moral, and sexual valences. Indeed, the play offers us examples of the word's distinct but interrelated connotations. We grasp the new political power of the plebeians (now designated Citizens) when we learn that Coriolanus "cannot go without any honest man's voice" in his election for the consulship and when Menenius pays lip service to the plebs' status by addressing them as his "honest neighbours" (2.3.118-19, 1.1.48); (20) Volumnia strips her son of both nobility and morality when she denounces him as "not honest" for dishonoring his mother (5.3.166); and Coriolanus highlights the word's connotations for both masculine and feminine sexual honor when, in a rare jest to a servant, he remarks, " 'tis an honester service [to meddle with thy master] than to meddle with thy mistress" (4.5.44-46). Second, even the deceptively simple "good" becomes a controversial descriptor in the play's opening lines, where it appears indicative of either upright conduct or socioeconomic standing. The Second Citizen's "One word, good citizens" is met with the First's cynical rejoinder, "We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good" (1.1.11-12). (21)

Under Xenophon's system in the Oeconomicus, the man who is truly "good and honest" must make sure never to be idle (or, in Volumnia's words, "voluptuously surfeit out of action" [1.3.20]). However, he must also always avoid all artisanal occupations, which weaken both the practitioner and the commonwealth:

   For such crafts as be called handy craftes, they be very abject and
   vile, and little regarded and esteemed in Citties and common
   welths. For they doo destroy the bodyes of those that doo occupy
   them, when they make them to sit alway at home and to be fed up
   alway in the shade, and some make them stand all day staring on the
   fire. And when the body is once tender and feeble, the stomack and
   Spirit must needes bear a great deale the weaker.

      And again they have small leasure to set their mindes and
   diligence to doo their friends any good, nor also the common welth.
   Wherefore suche men seeme to be but a small comfort to their friends
   at a neede, nor no good men to succoure their Contrey in time of
   jeoperdie. And for a suretie in some Citties and common welthes,
   and specially such as bee dayly in warre, it is not lawful to never
   a citizen to occupy any handy craft. (22)

The practitioners of such "handy craftes," identified with their trades, thus become both socially and corporeally "abject and vile, and little regarded and esteemed." Their daily indoor occupations weaken and effeminize their bodies, and their mental and spiritual faculties, along with their potential for political wisdom and masculine valor, are quick to follow. (23) Within the full context of the Oeconomicus, this condemnation of artisanship paves the way for an endorsement of an agrarian economy that dignifies all social strata, but in the context of his Rome, Coriolanus takes it as a hard line bisecting the state, dividing the "vile" masses from the "good and honest" patrician few such as himself. His fear that his marketplace performance will "by [his] body's action teach [his] mind / A most inherent baseness" takes on a new level of significance in light of the Oeconomicus's degradation of the craftsman's social and gendered identity (3.2.123-24). According to Coriolanus's binary reinterpretation of goodness and honesty, his nobility is at risk not so much from the passivity of his body as from its active occupation: if he performs a tradesman's "tender and feeble" role, his "body's action" must corrupt his aristocratic and masculine integrity. (24) Yet we learn from the outset of the play that the other inhabitants of Rome do not live in Coriolanus's starkly classified world: the plebeians, who have just been granted tribunes and therefore a share in the government of the commonwealth, are considered "citizens" both by the stage directions and among themselves. (25) Despite their occupational status as craftsmen, then, and despite Rome's present state of being "dayly in warre" with the Volsces, the plebeians present, to Coriolanus and his value system, an inadmissible paradox: citizens who occupy trades. (26)

Although Coriolanus's inherited economic values forbid him to practice any trade, in order to escape the ignobility and "voluptuous" effeminacy that would fall upon him if he were to "idly sit" as his inferiors do, he does require some form of physical and civic activity (2.2.70). Moreover, in seeking one, he need not "hate and fear" the marketplace, as Jagendorf has claimed he does; he must simply keep well clear of its unsuitable occupations. In fact, Socrates encounters Ischomachus--the exemplary "good and honest man" of the Oeconomicus--"at leasure" in Athens's center of public trade. (27) As Hutson points out, however, Ischomachus avoids direct answers to Socrates' questions about his precise purpose there, and Xenophon "is careful to define Ischomachus's marketplace activity as patrician obligation rather than commerce or trading." (28) Hutson observes that the aristocrat's mere position out of doors, rather than in the emasculating workspace of the craftsman, goes a long way toward validating his presence in the otherwise suspect setting of the marketplace. His location "signifies a state of apparent leisure which is actually preparedness-for-business, a State of being furnished, or possessed, of the means to speak and act to advantage in the public domain. If this quality of 'being outdoors,' simultaneously at leisure and 'occupied,' is what defines the gentleman, the next question is, how is it achieved?" (29) Coriolanus therefore may, and perhaps even should, be perfectly comfortable with standing in the marketplace, especially for the benefit of the commonwealth. The crucial point is that he be "at leasure" there, rather than engaged in any behavior that can be linked to craft or commerce. A certain type of virtuous (that is, both good and manly) passivity in the center of exchange should be totally acceptable under Coriolanus's binary code, while vulgar activity is not--an important distinction to which we shall return.

For now, though, the question of the gentleman's proper occupation remains, and at last, Xenophon's Socrates provides his friend Critobulus with an answer that Coriolanus may reduce and so embrace. The "good and honest" aristocratic man, unlike the "abject and vile" indoor-laborers of lower social strata, ought best to occupy himself with "the Science of warre, and also of husbandry":

   ye may see that they that be riche and fortunate, cannot well keep
   them from husbandry. For it is such an exercise and such a busines
   that a man may have plesure in it, bothe to encreace and multiply
   his goods, and also to exercise the body, so that it shall be able
   to doo all maner of things that belong to an honest man to doo
   [...] For it is an Occupation very soon learned, and very pleasant
   to be occupyed in it, the which also maketh a mans body mightie,
   strong, wel complexcioned and wel favoured, his stomack and his
   spirit to be alway lusty and ready to doo for his friends and for
   his contrey. (30)

In the Oeconomicus, this passage opens outward into a vision of men of all ranks engaging in virtuous agricultural work, whether as masters or as laborers in the field (preparing them to be "horse [men]" or "foot[men]" on the battlefield). (31) The peacetime occupation of a state's males readies them, both physically and spiritually, for service to their commonwealth in war. Xenophon further links the virile bodies of warriors and husbandmen through the motif of healthy sweat: "By the faith that I owe to God when I am well at ease," attests the heroic king Cyrus, "I never go to dinner until the time I have doon somewhat either in feats of armes or in some point of husbandry, til I sweat." (32) In Coriolanus's starkly reductive vision, however, war and husbandry contrast absolutely with inferior occupations, which are associated with the enfeebling, emasculating labor of craftsmen. Moreover, while Coriolanus also identifies sweat as an especially manly body fluid, he turns to this too as a mark of his own singular elitism. He prides himself on perspiring from the eyes rather than weeping, and even that only in extraordinary circumstances: "it is no little thing to make / Mine eyes to sweat compassion" (5.3.196-97). Whether as husbandman or as warrior, he strives to embody kalos kagathos not as Xenophon's beloved head of an economic community (like Ischomachus or Cyrus), but as "himself alone" (1.5.23).

We never see Coriolanus successfully performing any occupation other than that of warrior, but a close look at the terminology of his metaphors reveals that he does seem to identify himself, perhaps entirely fancifully, with an idealized agrarian-warrior class. Shutting down any communitarian vision of civic husbandry, he likens himself to a "single plot" of arable soil, "this mould of Martius," which is in danger of being ground "to dust" and flung "against the wind" by the coarse tradesmen who are ignorant of the art and science involved in agriculture (3.2.102-5, emphasis mine). In Rome as Coriolanus imagines it, poor people are apparently never farmers. Furthermore, he employs an agricultural lexicon to illustrate his condemnation of the plebeians' corn revolt, for which he claims that the patricians, as both governors and husbandmen, are to blame. In pacifying the rebels, he alleges, the aristocracy "nourish[es]"

   The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
   Which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed, and scattered
   By mingling them with us, the honoured number,
   Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
   Which they have given to beggars.
   (3.1.71-75)

While the metaphor of the "cockle" derives from North's Plutarch, Shakespeare interpolates Coriolanus's anxiety over the husbandmen's unfit "mingling." (33) Critically, according to Xenophon, the social strata ought to be mingled in their agrarian occupation, with the overseeing kalos kagathos ordering them, but Coriolanus disregards this complicating integrationism. His comparison of the patricians both to ploughmen and to the "honoured" seeds they sow resembles his identification of himself with fruitful land; they have a rightful place in the soil of the state, but the plebs and their treachery are a weed that the agrarian elite have foolishly permitted to mix with their noble crop. His binary misreading reasserts itself: tares should no more grow alongside grain than husbandmen should have to do with beggars, industry with idleness, or virtue and power with baseness and impotence. In their lenience toward rebellion and in their admission of the plebeians into the government of the commonwealth, Coriolanus holds, the naturally "good and honest" men of the aristocracy have compromised the purity of their stock and have diminished their honor, morality, manliness, vigor, and authority insofar as they have extended any potential for these qualities to "abject and vile" persons innately unworthy of them. While Xenophon's kalos kagathos is supposed to awaken this very potential in those whom he commands, Coriolanus can imagine only two kinds of people, and only one of these can be truly "good and honest." In a final agricultural metaphor, he concludes that the "good but most unwise patricians" have given the unfit tradesman-turned-husbandman leave "To say he'll turn [their] current in a ditch / And make [their] channel his" (that is, to steal or pollute the water for their crops): under his formulation, the superior sort has risked the utter destruction of natural hierarchy in permitting its crude inferiors to impinge upon its defining occupation and its rightful domain (3.1.92, 97-98). (34)

Of course, Coriolanus's primary active function within the commonwealth is that of the warrior. And as the commander of an army of conscripted plebeians, he finds them as consummately ill-equipped for battle as for agriculture. Assuming their artisanal occupations and hence their innate unsuitability, he makes only a stunted effort at military leadership (unlike Plutarch's version of the hero, as Jorgensen has noted), preferring to rush through the gate of Corioles and fight the enemy alone. As his troops flee, he berates and taunts them:

   You shames of Rome! You herd of--boils and plagues
   Plaster you o'er, that you may be abhorred
   Further than seen, and one infect another
   Against the wind a mile! You souls of geese
   That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
   From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell!
   All hurt behind: backs red, and faces pale
   With flight and agued fear!
   (1.4.32-39)

According to the ideology that Coriolanus so radically embodies, the troops' shameful conduct on the battlefield is only to be expected. Because of their supposed peacetime occupations, they were never meant to be fighters for their state, and they lack the bodily strength, the masculine "stomack and Spirit," and the aristocratic "leasure" for martial exercise that naturally pertain to Coriolanus and his superior stratum. In insulting them as "geese" that merely "bear the shapes of men," Coriolanus recalls his reductive version of the Xenophonie doctrine that their trades make them weak, cowardly, and ignoble domesticated creatures. Moreover, the avian epithet, which also served the early moderns as slang for "prostitute," hints at Coriolanus's revulsion at his plebeian soldiers' inclination to seek petty payment for their time and for the labor of their bodies, as we shall see. Even Coriolanus's excoriation of his fleeing troops is consistent with an incomplete perception of Xenophon's kalos kagathos or Aristotle's magnanimous man as singular and righteously punitive without being simultaneously communitarian and instructive: "For when I see [men] diligent," Ischomachus tells Socrates, "I doo bothe praise and rewarde them. And again when I see them negligent and rechelesse, I bothe doo and say all that ever I can to anger ... them ... I my self wil not suffer, that they that be worst, and they that be best, should be served all a like." (35) As far as Coriolanus is concerned, to be lowborn and of "base" occupation is to be too soft in body, too loose in morals, and too effeminate in spirit to be a true warrior, or even to merit courteous speech from the "good and honest." His otherwise baffling tendency to utter whatever will most "anger" the plebeians in his path--also seen in his barb to the Citizen about what it means to be "common"--proves simply to be the way he attempts to embody Aristotle's or Xenophon's requirements for virtuous conduct. He must constantly be dividing the masses of the "worst" from the few (or singular) "best."

Coriolanus' belief in the unmanliness of tradesmen who weaken their courage and their flesh by laboring indoors finds a significant corollary in another binary susceptible to reductive interpretation: the Oeconomicus's treatment of the proper occupation of women. Ischomachus's commentary on his dutiful wife feminizes indoor labor even more explicitly at the same time that it does so favorably, indicating that the "tender" bodies that practice household tasks are characteristic not only of artisanal laborers, but also of women who live according to their natural design:

   Also spinning, carding and weaving must be doon within the house.
   And where that bothe those things that must be doon abrode, and
   those that bee doon within the house, doo require care and
   diligence, me thinketh that God hath caused nature to show plainly
   that a woman is borne to take heed of all suche things as must be
   doon at home. For he hath made man of body, hart, and stomack
   strong and mightie, to suffer and endure heat and colde, to jorney
   and go a warfare. Wherefore God hath in a manner commaunded and
   charged him with those things that be doon abrode out of the
   house.... And where he hath ordained that the woman should keep
   those things that the man getteth and bringeth home to her, and he
   knowing very wel that for to keep a thing surely it is not the
   worse point to be doutful and feareful, he dealed to her a great
   deale more feare then he did to the man. And he also perceiving
   that if any man dooth him wrong the which laboureth and worketh
   without, he must defend him self, he distributed to the man a great
   deale more boldenesse. (36)

The nobleman's female counterpart, whose timidity and enclosure within the home are worthy of praise rather than condemnation, easily finds its representative in Coriolanus. The devoted but timorous Virgilia, bred according to Ischomachus's womanly ideal "to be sober and live in chastitie" as her husband's "gracious silence," reinforces the sense that there is something distinctly (and in her case, appealingly) feminine about those whose occupations and constitutions keep them indoors, rather than outside in the masculine fields of battle and of agriculture (2.1.148). (37) Coriolanus therefore has not only the "womanish" plebeians, but also his own consummately womanly wife, as convenient representations of the antithesis of masculine occupation and conduct.

Virgilia proves to be Coriolanus's only steadfast ally in living according to his model of bodily and vocational nobility. The fierce Volumnia derides her daughter-in-law's softness and "feareful" tendencies, which make her weep at the thought of her husband being wounded, but the Oeconomicus holds that these traits are proper for her sex, as is her eagerness to labor inside at her housework:

VALERIA Come, lay aside your stitchery. I must have you play the idle huswife with me this afternoon.

VIRGILIA No, good madam, I will not out of doors.

(1.3.62-64)

Although Virgilia too is a reduced caricature of her Xenophonie counterpart (Ischomachus's wife is her husband's active partner, tasked with leadership of their servants), she, like Coriolanus, is an unusually rigid embodiment of conduct literature's dichotomies concerning occupation and gender. No other patrician in the play insists upon adhering to so stark a code. Although they embody celebrated masculine Roman virtues, Volumnia and Valeria's teasing of Virgilia for her normative femininity exposes their flouting of Xenophonie gender binaries. Likewise, the language and behavior of Coriolanus' closest friends and relations indicate that they are more comfortable than Coriolanus would like with a vision of Rome not as an urbanized martial order with agrarian inflections but as a more socially and economically fluid proto-capitalist system.

Volumnia's contempt for feminine labor and fearfulness aside, she may appear otherwise to stand with her son and with certain passages from humanist conduct literature in disdaining the plebeians wholesale and in despising their trades simply for being trades. Indeed, she singles out artisanship as a defining characteristic of the plebs' baseness when she curses them for banishing Coriolanus: "Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome, / And occupations perish!" (4.1.13-14). Menenius too, when he abandons his conciliatory tone toward the lower orders, berates them by focusing on their grotesque laboring bodies and their practice of dishonorable "handy craftes":

        You have made good work,
   You and your apron-men, you that stood so much
   Upon the voice of occupation and
   The breath of garlic-eaters! ...
        You have made fair hands,
   You and your crafts! You have crafted fair!
   (4.6.99-102, 122-23)

Yet despite the apparent contempt of Coriolanus's fellow patricians for the "abject and vile" occupations of the plebs, the play's supporting cast of aristocrats, Volumnia included, fails to conform to its hero's uncompromising economic ideology. Nearly every discussion of gender in Coriolanus points to Volumnia as the first and greatest source of her son's crippling insecurities--and in fact, this emphasis on her undermining influence remains viable for an argument that considers economics and civic status alongside gender and sexuality. The rhetoric of Coriolanus's mother, above and beyond that of any other patrician, frequently violates the discourse that Coriolanus relies upon to define his identity.

Almost immediately upon meeting her, we find that Volumnia seems to think of Coriolanus suitably enough in intertwined terms of martial prowess, husbandry, and masculine bodily potency: "forth he goes," she envisions her son wreaking destruction on the battlefield, "Like to a harvestman that's tasked to mow / Or all or lose his hire" (1.3.30-32). Yet Volumnia's figuration falls critically short of Coriolanus's ideal for the "good and honest man": according to his socio-sexual economic code, her metaphor is tainted by the language of hired employment and wage labor. She sees Coriolanus not as a purely self-sufficient aristocratic husbandman, nor even in a more correctly Xenophonic supervisory role, but as the seasonal hired hand of that great impersonal husbandman, the commonwealth. As such, he suffers a reduction not only in rank but also in "honesty," with all of that word's far-reaching implications. Another contemporary conduct manual, consisting of the paraphrased work of several classical authorities (including Aristotle, Xenophon, and Cicero) and translated from French into English some ten years prior to Coriolanus, reports in one passage whose dualism would appeal to Coriolanus that Cicero "dooth shewe what occupations and gaines ought to bee accounted honest, and what vile and dishonest. First (sayeth hee) ... all Mercenary Trades, and generally all of them whose labours ... bee bought; for in them, their wages is the reward and obligation of servitude." (38) As Leggatt has noted, for Coriolanus "it is a small step from [work for pay] to prostitution," and Volumnia herself, by invoking the image of the wage laborer, authorizes a public perception of her son as someone whose body and time may be assigned economic as well as sociopolitical value. Volumnia may be proudly patrician, but she can at least imagine some degree of separation between occupation and the more nebulous markers of virtue and sexuality, and so does not operate under Coriolanus's rigorous binary ideology. What she sees as an apt metaphor for her son's formidable strength and single-mindedness in battle, he with his reductive code of aristocratic "honesty" can interpret only as socioeconomic abasement, and with it, emasculation and whoredom. (39)

In accordance with the convenient Ciceronian dichotomy, Coriolanus repeatedly repudiates the valuation of hourly wage labor, commercial exchange, and material reward that Volumnia endorses in her figurative language. In his disgust at his troops' looting of Corioles, he continues to illuminate his motives for his hatred of laboring Romans:

   See here these movers that do prize their hours
   At a cracked drachma! Cushions, leaden spoons,
   Irons of a doit, doublets that hangmen would
   Bury with those that wore them, these base slaves,
   Ere yet the fight be done, pack up. Down with them!
   (1.5.4-8)

In Coriolanus's view, the plebeian foot soldiers' greed for material goods and their extension of the wage labor system to the battlefield are entirely consistent with the notion he already holds that they are, by rank and occupation, uniformly weak, cowardly, unfit for combat, and generally base and dishonest. These tradesmen-turned-fighters who set cheap hourly rates for their work and squabble over clothing and petty household possessions again convince Coriolanus of their innate identification with unmanly practices, goods, and domestic spaces, and of their natural inaptitude for the warlike occupation of the "good and honest" man. West-Pavlov has argued that Coriolanus's reluctance to expose his wounds in the marketplace suggests that he sees his body as "private property," not unlike "consumer objects which increasingly filled the domestic interiors of early modern England." (40) However, Coriolanus expresses only contempt for such "consumer objects" and the proprietary mindset that pursues them. Despite the fact that Ischomachus values household items, Coriolanus always eschews the more nuanced view; where Xenophon's kalos kagathos complicates himself by appreciating artisanal products and domestic spaces, Coriolanus occupies a self-made category that scorns all material compensation, abhorring communitarian redistribution and pre-capitalist propriety alike and despising mercenary "movers," their cheap movables, and their parceled time. (41)

Therefore, for Coriolanus to expose his wounds to the plebeians, "As if [he] had received them for the hire / Of their breath only" and not "for praise and honour," would be a violation of his reductively "good and honest" economics. No longer able to conceive of himself as an honorable and virile warrior-husbandman, he would instead become his mother's hired harvestman, an ignoble, impure, and unmanly "part" that he might well "blush in acting" (2.2.139-45). Coriolanus claims to "blush" on another occasion as well, when Cominius rewards him for his valor with a horse and gear:

                              Therefore be it known,
   As to us, to all the world, that Caius Martius
   Wears this war's garland, in token of the which
   My noble steed, known to the camp, I give him
   With all his trim belonging.
   (1.9.69, 57-61)

This exchange--aristocratic, equestrian, and non-commercial--ought to be a trade that a "good and honest man" could accept without indignity, unlike Cominius's grandiose offer of a tenth of the battle's plunder, a "bribe to pay [his] sword" that Coriolanus "cannot make [his] heart consent to take" (1.9.37-38). Yet even his consensual acceptance of the horse causes him some embarrassment, since his comrades are beginning to reveal that they, like his mother, fail to share Coriolanus's ideology. Indeed, Titus Lartius's anticipation of Cominius's equestrian gift echoes Volumnia's conception of warriors as capital held and used by the commonwealth: "Here is the steed, we the caparison," Lartius announces, referring to Coriolanus as the creature of greatest value among the rest of the army, which has become his mere material trappings (1.9.12).

Sure enough, Coriolanus shies away from Lartius's metaphor, which instantly reminds him of his mother's complicating imagery: "Pray now, no more. My mother, / Who has a charter to extol her blood, / When she does praise me grieves me" (1.9.13-15). Cominius, however, relentlessly continues to speak of his friend and fellow patrician as a public commodity:

                                  You shall not be
   The grave of your deserving. Rome must know
   The value of her own. 'Twere a concealment
   Worse than a theft, no less than a traducement,
   To hide your doings[.]
   (1.9.19-23)

According to Cominius, Rome "must know / The value" of what she possesses in Coriolanus, just as "the camp" must be familiar with the value of Cominius's steed in order for it to serve as a fitting gift. To conceal that value would be to steal from the people to whom the warrior belongs. And finally, Menenius joins the chorus of patrician friends who threaten to sully Coriolanus' purity from the discourse of common trade, discourse that stubbornly reassociates him with his social inferiors:

   VALERIA In troth, there's wondrous things spoke of him.

   MENENIUS Wondrous? Ay, I warrant you, and not without his true
   purchasing.
   (2.1.114-16)

Menenius's words force Coriolanus into the role that he is so desperate to avoid: that of the buyer of the people's voices, trading the signs of his valor for their approval. Lee Bliss has referred to the aristocrats' overwhelmingly consistent vocabulary of material goods and commercial trade as "the patrician property image," but this is the wrong sort of image of the wrong sort of property for Coriolanus, common to practically every patrician except him: Volumnia, Cominius, Lartius, and Menenius are all united in their emphasis on everything that Coriolanus shuns. (42)

The conflict between Coriolanus, his mother, and his friends rises to a head during their debate about what exactly he must do in the marketplace to ensure his election by the people. Cominius, Volumnia, and Menenius band together to exhort Coriolanus to do whatever is necessary, while he, torn between their wishes and his ideology, thrashes about between compliance and self-assertion:

   CORIOLANUS

   Must I go show them my unbarbed sconce? Must I
   With my base tongue give to my noble heart
   A lie that it must bear? Well, I will do't ...
                                     To th'market-place!
   You have put me now to such a part which never
   I shall discharge to the life.

   COMINIUS
   VOLUMNIA

                              Come, come, we'll prompt you.
   I prithee now, sweet son, as thou hast said
   My praises made thee first a soldier, so,
   To have my praise for this, perform a part
   Thou hast not done before.

   CORIOLANUS

                           Well, I must do't.
   Away, my disposition, and possess me
   Some harlot's spirit! My throat of war be turned,
   Which choired with my drum, into a pipe
   Small as an eunuch or the virgin voice
   That babies lull asleep! ...

                             A beggar's tongue
   Make motion through my lips, and my armed knees,
   Who bowed but in my stirrup, bend like his
   That hath received an alms! I will not do't,
   Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth
   And by my body's action teach my mind
   A most inherent baseness.
   (3.2.100-124)

The "part" that Coriolanus has not performed before, toward which Cominius and his mother urge him, initially resembles that of the politic merchant, whose trade requires him first to manufacture or purchase his crafts and then to be crafty in selling them in the marketplace. All parties quickly agree that, in order to "play" a role so foreign to his aristocratic identity, Coriolanus must become an actor as well; however, he alone assumes that in so doing, he must also become something worse. Cominius, who once extolled Coriolanus for "[proving] best man i'th'field" of battle at an age "When he might act the woman in the scene," now "prompts" him to relinquish his warrior's role and "act the woman" after all, this time in the field of exchange (2.2.90-91). "Harlot," as Bliss and Peter Holland both note, may refer to a beggar or to an actor as well as to a prostitute, but we need not attempt to guess which usage Coriolanus intends, since he and his ideology do not differentiate between them. (43)

Merchant, actor, beggar, whore: all are "abject and vile" occupations to Coriolanus, and all are in essence the same "mercenary" trade, one in which "honesty" and pride are basely exchanged for something of lesser worth. Not psychosexual passivity, but the active acting of any one of several interchangeable occupations, makes Coriolanus feel like less of an aristocrat and less of a man. Berry, remembering that Coriolanus is itself a play, attempts to offer the disclaimer that "No discredit, clearly, attaches to the actors who act, for good reasons, what they are not," but his proviso points us to the crux of the matter. (44) Acting was widely judged to be socially and morally disgraceful in early modern England, and its marginal rise in reputation during Shakespeare's day indicates the same sort of ideological complexity that is stirring in Coriolanus's Rome and that the hero cannot bear. Coriolanus clings to a code that designates the merchant/actor as abject, dishonest, and thus unmanly, while his fellow patricians all suppose, like Berry, that an actor may have creditable "good reasons" for practicing his trade. As Eve Rachelle Sanders notes, when likened to the early modern actor, Coriolanus comes under simultaneous threat of "loss of social status, identification with an incorrect model, and imprinting of sexual deviance." (45) While her argument focuses more on Coriolanus's "feminization"--remarking upon his "utterly passive" wounded body--than on his concomitant occupational "class transgression," she does point out that the polemicist John Rainolds placed "lascivious women and disorderly men" in the same category, equally harmful to the actors portraying them. (46) John Davies' well-known epigram, too, reminds us that the space of the "play-house doores," where "A thousand townsmen, gentlemen, and whores, / Porters and seruingmen togither throng," might be deemed distasteful and dangerous for its mixing of ranks, occupations, and gendered bodies. (47) For an antitheatricalist, the theater becomes an open market for all the "abject and vile" trades whose condemnation by humanist authorities Coriolanus relishes in its simplest form. Any association with acting compromises the body and muddles the mind to an extent that would obliterate Coriolanus's sense of self.

Volumnia both encapsulates her son's crisis and reveals her utter inability to comprehend it when she urges him to persuade the common people "with such words that are but roted in / Your tongue, though bastards and syllables / Of no allowance to your bosom's truth" (3.2.56-58). While the Xenophonie honest gentleman should practice skillful rhetoric, he must have no talent for making "that that is false" appear "true"--a skill relegated to the actor, the crooked salesman, or the painted woman. (48) However, Coriolanus's mother would have him do just that. She recognizes, at least in her figurative language, that Coriolanus's marketing of himself to the plebeians means his "rote" performance of an actor's trade, which in turn demands the bearing of "bastard" words by both his "base tongue" and his "noble heart." Nevertheless, with her less dualistic conception of aristocratic identity, she cannot seem to grasp her son's ideological certainty that to alter his occupation by exchanging his warrior's strategy for the "policy" of the merchant-craftsman and the dishonesty of the actor is ultimately to render him ignoble, feminized, and whorish (3.2.43). Volumnia, apparently inadvertently, makes the fatal connection between plebeian occupation, emasculation, and impurity twice more, first when she teaches Coriolanus to plead with his "knee bussing the stones--for in such business / Action is eloquence," and again when she exhorts him, "Go, and be ruled, although I know thou hadst rather / Follow thine enemy in a fiery gulf / Than flatter him in a bower" (3.2.76-77, 91-93). The knee's "action" of "bussing"--that is, wantonly kissing--the ground of the marketplace is the action of a vulgar woman; it is "business" only for the fawning merchant and "eloquence" only for the feminized actor, and therefore it spells the end of vocational identity for the kind of absolute aristocrat that Coriolanus longs to be. (49) And the final concessionary "although" that Volumnia tosses off means nothing to her and everything to Coriolanus: the new prospect of seducing an enemy "in a bower" reawakens his earlier fear of letting the warrior's "steel [grow] / Soft as the parasite's silk," with the full range of connotations that such a softening entails (1.9.44-45). Menenius's concise praise of Volumnia for the wisdom of her advice to Coriolanus--"Noble lady!"--indicates that the current definition of nobility in the commonwealth at large has departed entirely from Coriolanus's conception of it (3.2.70). The dominant ideology of Rome, like that of Shakespeare's England, has shifted; the binary rules of conduct that might claim to prescribe the social, occupational, gendered, and moral positions of each member of society cannot stand, and so Coriolanus stands alone.

He cannot long resist Volumnia's pleas while in her presence, just as he will prove unable to do so at the play's climax. At last he yields to her suggestion that he act the part of the actor (and all its subsidiary roles):

   Mother, I am going to the market-place.
   Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves,
   Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved
   Of all the trades in Rome. Look, I am going.
   (3.2.132-35)

Coriolanus is going to do what he most dreads: to give, by his "body's action" and therefore by his mind's, his "love" to the "common body." He discovers that, in order to become "beloved / Of all the trades in Rome," he must be willing to embody and enact all those trades at once, and doing so will make him, in every sense of the word, "common in [his] love." If he desires the position of the noblest man in Rome, he must relinquish his "good and honest" binary system and render himself, in his own eyes, vulgar, dishonest, impure, and unmanly. Ultimately, he cannot bear to set his code aside to lead Rome, and so he resolves to destroy the state that declines to share his values. A horrified Cominius describes his eventual rejection of one of the few payments he once accepted for his labor of sacking Corioles, his honorific name:

                           'Coriolanus'
   He would not answer to; forbade all names.
   He was a kind of nothing, titleless,
   Till he had forged himself a name o'th'fire
   Of burning Rome.
   (5.1.11-15)

The new cognomen to which the warrior aspires must be "Romanus": only after having annihilated the economically disordered Rome can he define himself as the Roman, the last and best of his people. His assumption of exclusive rights to true Romanness by virtue of his singular ideology likewise prompts his desperate rejoinder to the plebeians who have just decreed his banishment from the city: "I banish you" (3.3.131, emphasis mine). If the tradesman cannot legitimately occupy civic power, and if the other patricians have ceded their authority, then Coriolanus imagines himself to be the one "good and honest man" left, the only real citizen and therefore all that remains of the state. In his continual division and ranking of every form of public identity, he has embraced gendered and socioeconomic dualism so fervently that he has become a monolith. As Menenius puts it, he "is grown from man to dragon"--but a dragon, awe-inspiring though it may be, is an ancient relic and a solitary monster, not the leader of a polity (5.4.13). Because Coriolanus has reduced his humanist sources into prescriptions for singular excellence rather than guides for communal leadership, his drive to be upheld as kalos kagathos, as the best and most honest man, destroys his wish and his ability to be consul. Unwilling to share any part of his identity in common with the common body, he would rather destroy than govern it. But both Rome and Shakespeare's England are relentless in their admission of greater and greater complexity of civic status, of gender, and of occupation. For the body politic to adapt and thrive, it is finally Coriolanus, with his singularly absolutist economy, who must be destroyed.

Notes

(1.) Lee Bliss, ed., Coriolanus: The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). All citations from Coriolanus are from this edition.

(2.) Charles Hofling, "An Interpretation of Shakespeare's Coriolanusin James E. Phillips, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Coriolanus (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 84-99, 89, 91.

(3.) Ralph Berry, "Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 13, no. 2 (1973), 301-16, 30; and Madelon Sprengnether, "Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus," in Mary Beth Rose, ed., Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse, NY : Syracuse University Press, 1986), 89-111, 101, 103. Readings by Coppelia Kahn, Cynthia Marshall, and Claudia Corti have continued to describe Coriolanus in similar psychosexual terms: see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), 144-59; Marshall, "Wound-man: Coriolanus, gender, and the theatrical construction of inferiority," in Valerie Traub et ah, eds., Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93-118; and Corti, " 'As if a man were author of himself: The (Re-) Fashioning of the Oedipal Hero from Plutarch's Martius to Shakespeare's Coriolanus," in Michele Marrapodi, ed., Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Surrey: Ashgate, 2007), 187-96. Joo Young Dittmann has combined psychoanalytic and historicist criticism in " 'Tear him to pieces': De-Suturing Masculinity in Coriolanus," English Studies 90, no. 6 (2009): 653-72.

(4.) Zvi Jagendorf, "Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts," Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1990): 455-69, 462, 464-65. Vivian Thomas has made the similar claim that the play's warrior protagonist, assured of "the superiority of his class," "never reveals the slightest indication of knowing what an economy is" (Shakespeare's Roman Worlds [New York: Routledge, 1989], 154-219, 155, 165).

(5.) Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 8.

(6.) Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 120.

(7.) Arthur Riss, "The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language," ELH 59, no. 1 (1992), 53-75, 55. See also David George, "Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus," Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 60,72.

(8.) Cathy Shrank, "Civility and the City in Coriolanus," Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2003), and Leah S. Marcus, "Coriolanus and the Expansion of City Liberties," in Susan L. Wofford, ed., Shakespeare's Late Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Prentice Hall, 1996), 188-96. Other scholars have argued that the play comments on different sociopolitical and/or economic phenomena: Robin Headlam Wells points to England's chivalric revival under James's warlike son Henry (" 'Manhood and Chevalrie': Coriolanus, Prince Henry, and the Chivalric Revival," The Review of English Studies 51, no. 203 [2000]:, 395-422); Alex Garganigo discusses James's goal of British unification ("Coriolanus, the Union Controversy, and Access to the Royal Person," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 42 [2002]: 335-59); Oliver Arnold examines England's turn toward popular representative government (The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Nate Eastman recontextualizes Coriolanus in relationship to urban rather than rural uprisings ("The Rumbling Belly Politic: Metaphorical Location and Metaphorical Government in Coriolanus," Early Modern Literary Studies 13, no. 1 [2007]: 1-39).

(9.) Janet Adelman, " 'Anger's My Meat': Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus," in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 129-49, 137.

(10.) Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (New York: Routledge, 1988), 189-213, 194. Russell West-Pavlov, too, remarks upon the parallels between Coriolanus's wounds and feminine genitalia while also reminding us that Coriolanus is disgusted by taking on the occupation of either an actor or a prostitute ("Author of Himself: Masculinity, Civility, and the Closure of the Body," in Rodies and their Spaces: System, Crisis, and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006], 127-44, 139-40).

(11.) West-Pavlov, Bodies and Their Spaces, 130. Notably, West-Pavlov reads Coriolanus as an embodiment of "a new code" of early capitalist civility and bodily modesty, whereas I place him here within an anti-capitalist old order (136).

(12.) Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 1994).

(13.) Paul A. Jorgensen, "Shakespeare's Coriolanus: Elizabethan Soldier," PMLA 64, no. 1 (1949): 221-35.

(14.) Markku Peltonen, "Political Rhetoric and Citizenship in Coriolanus," in David Armitage et ah, eds., Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 234-52, 246.

(15.) Ibid., 234-35. Peltonen cites Abraham Fleming, A panoplie of epistles, or, a looking glasse for the unlearned (London, 1576), sig. Aiv-ijr

(16.) For other discussions of how early modern masculinity came under pressure from economic and sociopolitical shifts, see Dittmann, "Tear him to pieces," 657, and Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39-66.

(17.) Kishlansky likewise comments on Coriolanus's "rigid values" and identifies his tragedy "as that of a society whose structures and values are incapable of absorbing the tensions and conflicts within it" (7).

(18.) Rodney Poisson, "Coriolanus as Aristotle's Magnanimous Man," in Waldo McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield, eds., Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1960), 210-25; John Alvis, "Coriolanus and Aristotle's Magnanimous Man Reconsidered, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 3 (1978): 4-28; and Carson Holloway, "Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Aristotle's Great-Souled Man," Review of Politics 69 (2007): 353-74.

(19.) All citations of the Oeconomicus are from Gentian Hervet (trans.), Xenophons treatise of house holde (Oeconomicus), London, 1573 (Early English Books Online, Cambridge University Library). My citations of Hervet emend early modern orthographic conventions for u/v and i/j.

(20.) Both "good" and "honest" could also connote the antithesis of high social standing when used in a patronizing tone from a superior to an inferior, so Menenius's "honest neighbours" can simultaneously be interpreted as dignifying the plebeians and as reminding them of their place.

(21.) Shakespeare employs similarly ironic wordplay on the two senses of "good" in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock and Bassanio reveal their disparate perspectives on Antonio (one moral, the other financial):

SHYLOCK Antonio is a good man.

BASSANIO Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?

SHYLOCK Ho, no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. (2.3.12-17)

See Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, eds., Folger Shakespeare Library: The Merchant of Venice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

(22.) Hervet, Oeconomicus, fol. 11v-12r.

(23.) Xenophon's opinion on the civic value of occupations was not universally shared. Jean Bodin proposes a direct counterargument: "Herodotus writeth, That in his time they were by the customes of all people accounted base, which vsed handy-craftes: of which opinion we read Xenophon also to haue beene, who yet yeeldeth a reason thereof not beseeming a philosopher; as forsooth that men of such occupations were still busied, and led a close and sedentarie life: for what can bee more painful or troublesome than the Generalls life? or more close and sedentary than the judges calling? And yet what can bee more glorious or more noble than they both are in every Citie and Commonweale?" See Bodin, Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (London, 1606), 397. I am grateful to Jim Siemon for this observation.

(24.) The Oeconomicus' representation of gendered occupations offers us another way of conceptualizing that problematic early modern distinction, "class," and reminds us of the myriad ways in which Shakespeare's audience might have understood social difference.

(25.) It may be noteworthy that the citizens in Coriolanus are actually undifferentiated by occupation, unlike the plebeians in the first scene of Julius Caesar. They do not identify themselves as cobblers or carpenters but as citizens, and Shakespeare does the same; however, Coriolanus and other patricians insistently cast them as artisanal "apron-men" or "crafts" people (4.6.100, 123). For a note on the tension throughout the play between the terms "citizen" and "plebeian," see Peter Holland's Arden edition of Coriolanus (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 149n.

(26.) Peltonen notes that some humanist schools believed "active citizenship" to be appropriate for all social strata, while others regarded it as the sole province of aristocratic men (234). Shakespeare's Coriolanus, of course, falls into the second camp. As Holland points out, the term "citizen" in early modern England typically denoted a "freeman of a city," or a person who was no longer bound to an apprenticeship. If early modern citizens could be (and often were) "merchants and tradespeople," then what seems impossible to Coriolanus was commonplace in Shakespeare's England. See Holland, Coriolanus, 149n.

(27.) Ibid., fol. 21r.

(28.) Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter 40.

(29.) Ibid.

(30.) Hervet, Oeconomicus, fol. 14r, 19v.

(31.) Ibid., fol. 16v.

(32.) Ibid., fol. 13v.

(33.) See Holland, Coriolanus, 426. Holland also points out Shakespeare may be "expanding the idea by linking it to the parable of the wheat and the tares ... from Matthew, 13.24-30" (273n).

(34.) Paul Cefalu has objected to a revisionist view of the plebeians as "agrarian-communist," arguing that the play should remind us of the political and economic contradictions inherent within the early modern state. Indeed, this reading of Coriolanus presents the protagonist as an aristocratic warrior who espouses residual agrarian values and is repulsed by what he sees as the beggarly protocapitalism of the proletariat. See Cefalu, "The Ends of Absolutism: Coriolanus and Jacobean Political Irony," in Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 53-78, 55. For the "agrarian-communist" reading to which Cefalu refers, see Thomas Sorge, "The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Routledge, 1990), 225-41.

(35.) Hervet, Oeconomicus, fol. 42v, 44v-45r.

(36.) Ibid., fol. 23v-24r.

(37.) Ibid., fol. 23r.

(38.) Loys Le Roy, Aristotles politiques, or Discourses of gouernment, London, 1598 (Early English Books Online, Cambridge University Library), 53-54.

(39.) For a recent consideration of Coriolanus as a technological tool engineered by his mother, see Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), 160-65.

(40.) West-Pavlov, Bodies and Their Spaces, 129.

(41.) For an extended argument touching on communism and capitalism in Coriolanus, see Cefalu, "The Ends of Absolutism."

(42.) Bliss, Coriolanus, 156n.

(43.) Ibid., 204n, and Holland, Coriolanus, 304n.

(44.) Berry, "Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus," 306.

(45.) Eve Rachelle Sanders, "The Body of the Actor in Coriolanus," Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006), 387-412. For other explorations of theatricality and gender in the play, see Dittmann, "Tear him to pieces," 665-66, and Clara Mucci, "Discourses of the Body: Coriolanus, the Theatre, and the Politics of the (Feminine) Jacobean Body," Textus 13 (2000): 347-65, 394.

(46.) Ibid., 395, 403.

(47.) Sir John Davies, Epigrammes and Elegies. By I. D. and C. M., London, 1599. (Early English Books Online, Cambridge University Library).

(48.) Hervet, fol. 40v.

(49.) Holland notes, "If the word [buss] has a coarse or lustful sense ... then it enhances the vulgarity of Coriolanus stooping to the crowd." In another juxtaposition of occupation and sexuality, Holland also finds a pun linking "buss" and "business" (301n).