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Article Excerpt
ESPECIALLY APPARENT IN Shakespeare's late tragedy Coriolanus are the venerable concept and related imagery of the body politic and its corporate parts. (1) In this scheme, Coriolanus apparently figures as the brawny arm and sword of the early Roman republic (e.g., I.i.115, I.vi.76), (2) a powerful limb whose use is essential in wartime but problematical in peace. (3) Besides this primary function within the Roman body politic (one that significantly lacks an imperial head), the last two syllables of Coriolanus's name, as commentators on the play occasionally have noted, specifies that part of the human anatomy associated with the expulsion of waste. (4) In this respect, Edmund Spenser had set a literary precedent for Shakespeare. In book 2, canto 9 of The Faerie Queene, Prince Arthur and Guyon tour Alma's Castle, the House of Temperance, an allegorical model of the human body and its processes. The "liquor" that forms the by-products of digestion
By secret wayes, that none might it espy, Was close conuaid, and to the back-gate brought, That cleped was Port Esquiline, whereby It was auoided quite, and throwne out priuily. (5) (II.ix.32.6-9)
In editor A. C. Hamilton's words, the "Port Esquiline [was] a gate in ancient Rome, its anus as it gave passage to the common dump." (6) Sir John Harington, in A New Discourse of a Stale Subject Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), had identified and described the "doung gates" of London and Jerusalem through which dung gatherers and carriers transported their daily load of human waste. (7) Recently Jeffrey Masten, broadening the anatomical significance of Spenser's "Port Esquiline," has noted that Spenser's "passage thus associates the body part [the rectum] with the gate near Rome's Esquiline Hill, used as a pauper's cemetery in antiquity. Moreover, the Red Cross knight's exit from the House of Pride is via a 'priuie Posterne,' a 'fowle way,' strewn with 'many corses ... / Which all through that great Princesse pride did fall / And came to shamefull end.'" (8) The italics in this last quotation are Masten's, meant to indicate a Spenserian pun involving the fundament.
In terms of the corporate imagery of the body politic in Coriolanus, the protagonist, nominally associated with the anus, (9) is expelled through an equivalent of the famous Roman Port Esquiline. "Bring me but out at gate" (IV.i.47), "wasted"--banished, valueless--Coriolanus tells his family and small band of supporters. (10) Coriolanus is identified from time to time as a toxin within the Roman body politic that, for its health, should be eliminated, cast out (e.g., III.i.89-91, 224-26,304). By the beginning of act 4, Coriolanus's socially disruptive behavior has exhausted his "use" for the health and strength of the body politic; he has finally become unassimilable. In this sense, he resembles figurative feces "brought out"--expelled--from the body-politic's "gate." (11) In the following pages, I want to explore the significance of Shakespeare's wordplay upon the "anus" component of the name "Coriolanus," not so much in the above-described symbolic terms as in those of a backward "voice" and its "excremental" speech and their place among Coriolanus's other voices. Providing a crucial context for my argument is Shakespeare's creation of the notion of a backward voice beginning with A Midsummer Night's Dream and extending through Othello to The Tempest.
Interestingly, Shakespeare early in Coriolanus establishes the phenomenon of an anal, or backward, voice independent of Caius Marcius, as though it were a Roman trait. In act 2, scene 1, the self-styled "humorous patrician" (II.i.47) Menenius tells his adversaries, the people's tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, that he has been a Roman who "converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning" (II.i.51-53). Shakespeare soon establishes the notion of a conversation with an anal, or backward, voice when Menenius tells Sicinius and Brutus that they do not report any matter well, when one "find[s] the ass in compound with the major part of [their] syllables" (II.i.58-59). Menenius's main joke implies--to use David Bevington's words--that auditors "find asininity in nearly everything [the tribunes] say (with a pun on ass in compound, meaning legal phrases ending in--as, like whereas)." (12) This Roman's secondary jest is cruder, connoting in the context of his remark about conversing with the night's buttocks that Sicinius and Brutus are speaking asses--and that their speech is cloacal. (13) Citations from a number of sources show that, as a variant form of "arse," the word "ass" in Shakespeare's time was used for the buttocks or rump. (14) The obscene idea that Sicinius and Brutus are talking asses gets focused in this subsequent diarrhetic accusation of Menenius against the tribunes: "When you are hearing a matter between party and party, if you chance to be pinched with the colic, you make faces like mummers, set up the bloody flag against all patience, and, in roaring for a chamber pot, dismiss the controversy bleeding, the more entangled by your hearing" (II.i.72-77). Heard in this scatological context, the adjective "bleeding" could refer not simply to a controversy but also to diarrhetic tribunes, with the "bloody flag" stained early modern privy wiping cloth.
Menenius's unsavory suggestion of a speaking ass is fitting, since, according to Alex Garganigo, he probably has just "spoken" in this manner during his articulation of the parable of the belly. (15) In reply to First Citizen's question, "Well, sir, what answer made the belly?" Menenius employs insulting audible body language:
Sir, I shall tell you. With a kind of a smile, Which, ne'er came from the lungs, but even thus-- For, look you, I may make the belly smile As well as speak--it tauntingly replied To th' discontented members, the mutinous parts That envied his receipt; even so most fitly As you malign our senators for that They are not such as you. (I.i.105-12)
Menenius's phrase "but even thus" in his main utterance "but even thus ... it tauntingly replied" indicates that he synchronizes this utterance to either a willed belch or report of passed wind. (16) The eruption, in either case (but especially the latter), amounts to the patrician's comically subversive, contemptuous "reply" to the commoners. Considered in retrospect, the sudden, shocking sound of calculated flatulence is especially appropriate, because Menenius will soon be implying that the plebs' tribunes are compulsive speaking asses.
Shakespeare first dramatizes the idea of a speaking ass in A Mid-summer Night's Dream. By naming the Athenian weaver "Bottom," he associates the repeated epithet for Bottom--"ass"--not simply with the ignorant beast of burden but also with the human posterior. (17) Commentators on A Midsummer Night's Dream have long recognized Chaucer's The Miller's Tale as a source for Shakespeare's early comedy. Certain details of this Canterbury Tale can be detected in Thisbe's complaint, "I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all" (V.i.200). This "hole" acquires an anal identity from Shakespeare's obscene wordplay on "stones" (testicles) in Thisbe's claim that her "cherry lips have often kissed [the wall's] stones, / Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee" (V.i.189-90). (18) The Chaucerian precedent for Shakespeare's obscenely comic suggestion of Thisbe's kissing a human posterior derives in The Miller's Tale from Absolon's mistaken kissing of Alisoun's--and then her suitor Nicholas's--backside rather than Alisoun's...
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