University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 1967 Imagery in Coriolanus Lois Margaret Jarka The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Jarka, Lois Margaret, "Imagery in Coriolanus" (1967). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 2643. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/2643 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. hi IMAGEEÏ IN CORIOLAMJS Lois Margaret Jarka B. A. University of Montana, 1964 Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA 1967 Approved by: Chairman, Board of Examiners Dean^ Graduate School JUN 7 1967 Date UMI Number: EP34736 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI EP34736 Copyright 2012 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuesf ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346 "The fundamental word In art is not Impression, "but design; and analysis simply means discovery of the design." Msgr. F.C. Kolbe in Shakespeare's Way TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page Introduction iii Chapter One . The Four Dominant Patterns of Meaning 1 Chapter Two Act I - "Tis his kind of speech..." The Speech Pattern 17 The Name Pattern 33 The Nobility Pattern 4l The Nature Pattern 4$ Chapter Three Introduction to Acts II and III 66 Act II - "never a worthier man..." Scenes: 1 72 ii 79 111 90 Chapter Four Act III - "too noble for the world..." Scenes: 1 ' 103 I I 114 III 125 Chapter Five Act IV - "I'll do well yet..." Scenes: 1 134 ii 137 ill l40 Iv 14-3 V l46 vi 156 vil 160 1 Chapter Page Chapter Six Act V - "he's the rock, the oak..." Scenes: i I65 i i 173 ii i 176 i v 191 V 194 Selective Bibliography 203 ii Introduction As Theodore Spencer says, Coriolanus has "never been popular." Critics are strangly divided in their reactions to the play. Spencer, like many who praise its craftsmanship, asserts that "though we admire [CoriolanusJ , we admire it in cold blood." He dispenses with the play in three pages as being merely a "study in human behavior," and finds that it does not have "enough universality to rank it with the great tragedies."^ Few critics seem to have been able to penetrate the hard, often brittle surface of Coriolanus to feel, beneath what Harold C. 2 Goddard calls its "clarity of full daylight," the warm human darkness of misplaced tenderness and love that distorts the world for Coriclanus as thoroughly as it does for King Lear. M. ¥. MacGalium long ago sensed the greatness of Coriolanus, and 3 his study, published in 1910, with its acute insight into the human as well as the political situation involved, remains one of the most valuable interpretations of the play. Since then other provocative and helpful short studies have appeared; the best of them are by John Middleton Mirry (first written in 1921),^ G. Wilson Knight (1930),^ ^Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 19^9), pp. ITT and I83. 2 Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951)^ II, p. 209. 3 M. W. Mac Galium, Shakespeare's Roman Flays and Their Background (London, I9IO), pp. 454-62?. Vohn Middleton Murry, John Clare and Other Studies (London, 1950). ^G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, 1930). iii H. C. Goddaxd (published posthumously in 1951),^ and by Harry Levin in his brief but penetrating introduction to his edition of Coriolanus (1956). But it is only in very recent years that Coriolanus has been awarded the kind of serious attention it merits. Derek 'Eraversi^ in his excellent study, Shakespeare ; The Roman Plays (I963), presents, at last, a comprehensive modern critical exposition of the play, and assigns Coriolanus its proper place among Shakespeare's great tragedies. In the past thirty years scholars and students have begun to read Shakespeare with new eyes and to discover aspects of his craftsmanship •which have never before been fully appreciated because they have never been so thoroughly explored. This new way of seeing Shakespeare's work began with a curiosity about him as a man. Caroline Spurgeon^ attempting to come nearer to Shakespeare's "person," undertook in the 1930's an extensive classification of images which recur in many of his plays as a means of revealing Shakespeare's main kinds of interests and the quality of his imagination. In 1936, one year after her pioneer study, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us, appeared, Wolfgang Clemen, a German scholar, working quite independently, published his Shakespeares Eilder, the original German version of The Development of Shakespeare' s Imagery• Clemen was less interested in:the "content" of the imagery than in Shakespeare's development of the increasingly organic function of the image in the dramatic structure. He traced the development from the early plays where much of the imagery is either decorative similg or only loosely connected with the overall design, to the late plays in ^loc. cit. which recurrent images, serving "several ends at one time," form an organic part of the total structure. Since the publication of these two studies, imagery has been a major concern:'in Shakespearean scholarship. The possibilities Inherent in this concern for exhaustive studies of individual plays were first explored by Robert B. Heilman. In 19^8 he published This Great Stage; Image and Structure in "King Lear." Heilman discovered that iterative images in King Lear, while interweaving and qualifying one another, group themselves around certain concepts or "root ideas" central to the play, and form what he calls "patterns of meaning." Like individual metaphors, the patterns themselves reinforce, qualify and illuminate each other. Heilman also discovered that "basic" words (e.g., the simple verbs, see and know), not ordinarily thought of as metaphcric., take on the nature of images through repetition and accumulation of many diverse associations. This extension of the usual function of imagery is most apparent in the later plays where Clemen had found Shakespeari's method "more subtle and indirect."® In Coriolanus much "basic" language is used metaphorically, arid perhaps for this reason the play has been thought of as one of the least poetic of Shakespeare's works. Goddard echoes the opinions of many critic; when he states that Coriolanus "lacks poetry," but he adds the qualification, "in a narrower sense.He does not enlarge on this point, TWolfgang Clemen, The Development^ of Shakespeare' s Imagery (New York, 1951), p. 222. 8 Clemen, p. 90« 9 Goddard, p. 209- V and we can only speculate that Goddard must have discerned a poetic quality in the play that could not be accounted for in terms of direct overt metaphor of the kind that enriches Antony and Cleopatra. Traversi comes closest perhaps to suggesting the quality of the poetry in Coriolanus when he says of the Roman tragedies: The style of these plays, far from reflecting a pedestrian process of versification, shows a unique combination of narrative lucidity, achieved through the easy, almost conversational use of spoken rhythms, and vernacular phrases, with poetic intensities that flow effortlessly from this foundation whenever the state of the action so requires. This marriage of colloquial ease with the heights of emotional expression is achieved with a consistency hardly paralleled elsewhere in Shakespeare's work.10 The more familiar we become with Coriolanus, the more we begin to realize that its| poetry the language, not something we can speak of separately. The most colloquial phrase takes on the nature of an image for, through the process of repetition, it not only accumulates ether meanings,I-but begins to function metaphorically in terms of them. The result is a work so organically conceived that hardly a word means only itself. It seems to me that Coriolanus is an example of what Hermann Brcch describes as Altersstll, the "style of old age" which is "not always a product of the years; it is a gift implanted along with his other gifts in the artist, ripening, it may be, with time, often blossoming before H ii;s season, or unfolding of itself even before the approach of age or l^Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford, 1963), p. 10. vi death: it is a reaching of a new level of expression..." In this Altersstil Broch places the mature work of Rembrandt and Goya, Bach's Art of the Fugue, the last quartets of Beethoven, and the final scenes of Geothe's Faust. He asks: What is common to these various examples? All of them reveal a radical change in style, not merely a development in the original direction; and this sharp stylistic break can be described as a kind of abstractism in which the expression relies less and less on the vocabulary, which finally becomes reduced to a few prime symbols, and instead relies more and more on the syntax: for in essence this is what abstractism is--the impoverishment of vocabulary and the enrichment of the syntactical relations of expression; in mathematics the vocabulary is reduced to nothing, and the system of expression relies exclusively on the syntax.