Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 53-124

Excerpt:

“We are introduced to the Republican regime in Coriolanus in a moment of crisis. Faced with open rebellion against their authority, the city’s rulers must give an account of themselves:

I tell you, friends, most charitable care
Have the patricians of you. For your wants,
Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them
Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
Appear in your impediment. For the dearth,
The gods, not the patricians, make it, and
Your knees to them, not arms, must help. Alack,
You are transported by calamity
Thither where more attends you, and you slander
The helms o’ the state, who care for you like fathers,
When you curse them as enemies.

Menenius begins his defense of patrician rule sensibly, form our point of view, by assuring the plebeians that the Senate does care about them. We would expect him to continue with detailed evidence of the Senate’s care, perhaps an explanation of the measures being taken to alleviate the famine in Rome, at least a declaration of the Senate’s intention to do something about the problem. But Menenius says nothing of the kind, and the ease with which he dismisses the “wants” of the plebeians leaves us wondering in what way the Senate can care about them, especially it it claims to be unmoved by their “suffering in this dearth.” In lines 67-72, Menenius creates a pwerful image of the Senate’s utter indifference to the demands of the plebeians. As he pictures it, the “Roman State” is not rooted in the soil of the Roman people, deriving its power from them, but it is instead raised far about them, as high as the heavens, and seems to have a motive force of its own, sufficient to crush any number of its citizens who might get in its way. Whatever Menenius’ notion of the state may be, it seems to fly in the face of all our ideas of the proper relation of a government to its people.”

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