I find being praised an uncomfortable experience. There are possibly several reasons for this, such as the inevitable injustice of elevating any one person’s efforts when so much excellent work goes unacknowledged and unseen. There is also the danger that praise is a tool of patronage and amounts to little more than a loan which will one day be called in. Lastly, the words used in praise inevitably fail to fully capture the deeds they describe: they are either too capacious or too perfunctory. Among other writers, Shakespeare is notable for his exploration of the ‘precarious correspondence between words and meanings’ (Sicherman, C. M. 1972. Coriolanus: the failure of words. ELH, 39(2), 189-207). Of course, praise can be genuine and well-intentioned – but I would much prefer not to be subjected to it.

Recently I watched a film adaptation of Coriolanus. The character of the play’s title is not a sympathetic figure. He is a stubborn, able and determined fighter, admired greatly by his troops. But he has very little time for ordinary people – the plebs – or their leaders. When he is seeking to become consul, encouraged by his mother, the Senate meets to recount the many worthy deeds which substantiate his appointment, Coriolanus moves to leave the chamber:

Your Honors, pardon.
I had rather have my wounds to heal again
Than hear say how I got them.

Coriolanus Act 2 scene 2

Despite attempting to persuade him to stay, Coriolanus eventually leaves the Senate. Perhaps he finds it impossible to remain when words sound so hollow compared with the deeds they describe. Warfare is a reality that none can imagine who have not stood within it, or know what it is to be such a danger to the lives of others. Oratory risks tidying away complex affairs and obliterating the wounds they leave. Before departing Coriolanus adds:

I had rather have one scratch my head i’ th’ sun
When the alarum were struck than idly sit
To hear my nothings monstered.

Ibid.

Perhaps surviving appears to be a nothing in the context of war. Many people caught up in the chance nature of conflicts, know that a decision to turn left, rather than right, is the difference between life and death. When I heard the remarkable Arek Hersh speaking about his time in a concentration camp, while standing in Auschwitz next to one of the kind of cattle trucks in which he was forced to travel decades before, it was a powerful testament to the apparent arbitrariness of survival.

USSR – CIRCA 1980: Postcard shows Italian Majolica from Hermitage Plate “Coriolanus’s mother and wife implore Coriolanus to spare Rome”, Faenza, 1523, workshop of Casa Priora, circa 1980

Shakespeare appears to have been very interested in ‘nothing’. The title of Much Ado is a play on the word, and ‘nothing’ occurs 34 times in King Lear. In Coriolanus’ bitter sense of rejection as he is sent away from Rome, he undergoes a fundamental crisis of identity. He has been a loyal and outstanding warrior for the Republic – his decision to cross into the camp of his enemy is a ‘Damascus Road’ transformation. His former commanding officer, Cominius, goes to entreat him to be at peace with Rome – and is rejected. Returning to the capital, Cominius describes the state in which he found his late deputy:

“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.

Shakespeare, W. Coriolanus Act 5 scene 1.

Forging a name in battle is a long-standing tradition in many cultures. As a result of his service in WWII Montgomery’s most senior title was ‘1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein’. For Marcius it is the heat of battle that creates for him a title earned in combat, and takes a form of the name of the city where the battle occurred: Corioli. There appears to be genuine modesty in the response of Coriolanus to the gifts that are showered upon him in the moment of victory. He refuses the offer of a tithe of all the treasure in the city, and instead wants to receive the same portion as every other soldier. As he says: ‘I have done as you have done – that’s what I can’. However, refusing to play the game of reward and gratitude can be a dangerous course of action, as Coriolanus comes to discover. He is banished.

Renouncing his past titles and honours, walking away from his citizenship, leaves the resigned general in extreme isolation. I’m not sure that I agree with Ibsen that, “The strongest man upon the earth is he who stands most alone.” Nevertheless, Coriolanus sacrifices an enormity of rank and resources when he sides with his former enemy. As his mother tells him at one point: ‘You are too absolute’. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, people who took an absolute view about religion and the state could find themselves losing titles and property, not to mention their lives. The playwright was familiar with those who could, in a moment, become ‘a kind of nothing’. A state of loss which is perhaps the precursor of a wisdom that comes to us, all too often, far too late:

For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living …

William Butler Yeats, “Blood and Moon”