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The F text of Coriolanus certainly seems to reflect in some of its features an authorial basis, for instance in its retention of at least one possible 'Shakespearean' spelling and, more generally, in its often full and `literary' SDs that perhaps reflect either Shakespeare's own `bridging' thoughts during composition, as he stitched together episodes from North's Plutarch into dramatic form, or a later fleshing out of brief SDs with narrative details intended to help his acting company understand the evolving, quite fast-moving and complicated, story.[8] Sweeping claims for Shakespearean spellings surviving into the printed texts have been rightly challenged, but there is more critical agreement about one spelling predeliction that does appear in Coriolanus.[9] In the fragment of the manuscript Booke of Sir Thomas More by Hand D, thought by many to be Shakespearean autograph, the noun silence is spelled with an sc, scilens; the sc preference reappears in scattered earlier texts of Shakespeare plays thought to have been set from `foul papers' — Scilens for Justice Silence in the SHs of quarto 2 Henry IV, Sceneca for Seneca in the
Stage directions that exceed the needs of a book-holder include 1.3's informative introduction of the women, specifying their relationship to the protagonist as well as their immediate physical actions: Enter Volumnia and Virgilia, mother and wife to Martius: | They set them downe on two low stooles and sowe. Titus Lartius' movements are twice tracked with some care: at 1.9.11/759, Enter Titus with his Power, from the Pursuit,[16] and the elaborate opening SD of 1.7 that locates the action in time and space, in its F form nearly half as long as the scene itself: Titus Lartius, having set a guard upon Carioles, going with | Drum and Trumpet toward Cominius and Caius Mar- | tius, Enters with a Lieutenant, other Souldiours, and a | Scout. Other SDs display a literary turn of phrase, as when two officers enter at the beginning of 2.2 to lay cushions, as it were, in the Capitoll, or 1.6 where Cominius enters as it were in retire, with soldiers, or when Coriolanus makes his final entrance in 5.6, the Commoners being with him. Some are `literary' in the most literal sense, having been lifted almost verbatim from the section of North's Plutarch that Shakespeare was at that moment casting in dramatic form: at 1.4.29/523 the Romans are beat back to their Trenches, and at 4.4.0 Coriolanus enters in meane Aparrell, Dis- | guisd, and muffled.[17]
Some elements of Shakespeare's original papers thus survive in the 1623 printed text, although this does not necessarily mean the compositors had Shakespeare's own hand before them rather than a scribal transcript faithful to at least some features of the original. Although it is impossible to distinguish with complete certainty between scribal and authorial copy, several aspects of the F text suggest the manuscript was not Shakespearean holograph. The Oxford Textual Companion has gathered a number of these features as evidence for its argument that printer's copy for Coriolanus was a scribal transcript. The preponderance of ha's over has and, less decisively, do's or doe's over does is uncharacteristic.[18] The contracted form a'th' occurs
Two other contracted forms in Coriolanus might be added to this list, and, although it is only a remote possibility, the first may even derive from an idiosyncratic Shakespearean spelling. In Sir Thomas More's three pages by Hand D, we find one example of tooth (= to th').[21] All ten of Compositor A's forms of this contraction in Coriolanus are spelled toth', and he also uses this spelling (in five out of six instances) in Macbeth; yet since it does not appear in the other eight F plays on which he worked, this is unlikely to be his preference imposing itself. (Compositor B resists this form: all 11 of his spellings in Coriolanus are to'th'.) The probable explanation is that the scribes for Coriolanus and Macbeth (who do not, on other evidence, appear to have been the same man) were either tolerant enough of tooth to only semi-modernise it or, less likely, themselves preferred toth'. Another rarity in F plays, in this case almost certainly scribal, lies in the four occurrences of it's (three set by Compositor B, one by A). Tis is by far the more usual form of this contraction, and the only other F play with this number of it's is Henry VIII, set from scribal transcript.[22] It may also be worth noting that two misprints
If Hand D in the More manuscript is Shakespeare's, his punctuation was light almost to the point of non-existence: in these three pages there are no colons, round brackets, exclamation or interrogation marks, and `an average of one comma to every five lines, a lower ratio than in any of the Good Quartos, and about one-sixth of the rate of use in a normally punctuated First Folio text'.[24] Absent punctuation could easily lead astray a copyist trying to make sense of, and mark, the syntactical units in such a manuscript.[25] Some of the relatively heavy and sophisticated pointing in Coriolanus was probably added in the printing house: apostrophes indicating elision of a letter, which on the evidence of Hand D in More Shakespeare indicated by spelling alone;[26] some at least of the colons, semicolons, brackets, additional commas, marks of interrogation and exclamation, as well as emphasis capitals.[27] It is unclear who is responsible for the probable purging of the contracted spelling in words for which the meter requires syncopation or slurring; of the many, many instances of full-spelling words that need to be reduced by a syllable in
Compositorial sophistication does not sufficiently explain a number of uncharacteristic features of Coriolanus's punctuation, however. The high incidence of certain unusual contractions, clipped forms, and pseudo-grammatical apostrophes (ha's, doe's), noted above, all point away from Shakespearean holograph for the F manuscript copy. [29] In some of its other punctuation too — notably in exclamation marks and round brackets — Coriolanus is untypical. Since Compositor B `heavily interfered with the punctuation of his copy', in this matter he makes an unrelaible indicator;[30] it is to the more conservative Compositor A that we should look for signs that the copy manuscript was already generously pointed. In Compositor A's work in F, excluding The Winter's Tale (a Ralph Crane transcript that would be rich in brackets), he worked on nine plays and set 112 brackets in 104 pages.[31] At this rate, in Coriolanus Compositor A was setting nearly double his usual number per page, and in fact his rate is nearly that of Compositor B, whose slightly higher average of 2.1 per page probably reflects his tendency to add his own brackets to those he found in his copy. Compositor A's heavier than normal use of round brackets (13 in all) suggests scribal rather than authorial copy, since he does not seem to add them on his own initiative. On the other hand, Compositor A seems to have resisted exclamation marks: there are only nine in 120 pages of his work in F, and he omitted all six in setting from printed copy for F Richard II.[32] That there is only one such mark in his seven and one-quarter pages of Coriolanus is not surprising, though his resistance makes it highly likely that the mark stood in his copy and fairly likely that there were more that he suppressed. In Compositor B's pages there are 13, and even though some of them may be his own additions, it is also probable that he was encouraged by the presence of exclamation marks in his copy. On the basis of his work from printed copy, at least slightly over half the exclamation
The nature of the mislineation in Coriolanus suggests that here, too, both compositors and scribe contributed errors to what was probably in this respect an already confusing original manuscript. If Hand D in More is a reliable guide, Shakespeare was himself misleading: he did not capitalise the initial letter of a verse line, and he tended to crowd the concluding part-line of a speech onto the preceding line to save space at the bottom of a page. In the three pages of More, there are three examples of mislineation.[34] Inaccurately cast-off copy could push both compositors to purposefully alter their copy: in some cases cramming one and one-half lines onto one line of type, in others needlessly splitting lines to take up space, as well as relining verse as prose and prose as verse. As Paul Werstine points out, Compositor B is in general more faithful to his copy's verse lineation than A, though A is more reliable in lining prose. Compositor A's unreliability with verse frequently stems from his apparent dislike of enjambment and preference for emphasising syntactical structure; as a consequence, he was more than willing to relineate on his own to create end-stopped verse.[35] In such circumstances, Compositor B's pages are more likely to indicate the extent to which the manuscript behind Coriolanus was itself ambiguous or erroneous. The same ambiguities in lineation in the Hand D pages of More were apparently frequent in the F copy for Coriolanus: there, Compositor B `mislined more verse passages containing short lines than he did in all the rest of the plays he shared with A'.[36] Most probably not all instances stood in his copy, since he was also using mislined verse as a way to save and waste space, yet the examples of F Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, where combined verses are spread across the stints of both compositors and which were not set from cast-off copy, `makes it evident that the source of the combined verses in all three plays probably lies beyond the commpositors'.[37] Werstine concludes that the high incidence of mislineation in Hamlet is at least in part scribal, since it is generally agreed that a transcript underlies the F version of that play, and speculates that the same may be true for Coriolanus and Antony.[38]
Some inconsistencies in the naming of characters in SDs and SHs may take us, from another direction, a bit closer to distinguishing between an authorial or scribal origin for the printing- house copy of Coriolanus. Certainly, those for Titus Lartius have not been standardised. Not only does reference to him vary between Tit. or abbreviations of Lartius in SHs (Lart., Lar.), but he is also once addressed as Titus Lucius within a speech (1.1.239/262), becomes Titus Latius in the SD at 2.1.161/1060 and, later, Titus Latius in the entry direction and Latius as SH throughout 3.1. The first misnaming, at 1.1.239/262, is by Compositor B, the others by A. In the first case, hasty and therefore slightly illegible script, with an open a and a dropped or extremely abbreviated r, might have produced Lucius, since t is easily mistaken for c in secretary hand. Given the other occurrences of Latius, however, it is perhaps more likely that this is what the compositor misread as Lucius. In Compositor A's stints, the SD in 2.1 might be a simple misreading, again due to ambiguous copy; he had correctly set Titus Lartius 35 lines earlier on the same page. Yet it is also possible that Latius stood in the manuscript here, too, either in Shakespeare's hand or carefully copied by a scribe. The edition of North's Plutarch almost certainly used by Shakespeare, that of 1595, mentions this figure, described as `one of the valliantest men the ROMANES had at that time', only once in the text, as Titus Latius; in North's marginal comment the designation is Titus Lartius, a valliant Romaine.[39] Both spellings may have stuck in Shakespeare's mind, even though he had provisionally settled on one and used it as the dominant form in Act 1.[40] As Shakespeare moved on from the conquest of Corioles, the only part of Plutarch in which Titus is specifically involved, and also into scenes of his own creating — Coriolanus' triumphant return to Rome in 2.1 and a new setting (3.1) for the Plutarchan speech in which Coriolanus argues against giving corn to the people — the distinction between `Latius' and `Lartius' may have become blurred and one form substituted for the other when his mind was concentrated elsewhere. In 2.1 Titus has no speaking part; indeed, in Shakespeare's own chronology of the story, Titus should not be in Rome at all. His presence is needed for the visual effect of the tableau of military heroes Menenius defines as the `three, that Rome should dote on' (2.1.187/1096). If Latius did stand in the copy SD, it would in this scenario represent an authorial
The beginning of 3.1 is a slightly different case, but one that may point to Compositor A setting from scribal copy. Titus Latius not only appears in the entry direction, but he is for twenty lines the focus of Coriolanus' attention and has five speeches, all with the SH Latius. Yet although the mistake seems of greater magnitude here, its repeated occurrence requires only a single appearance of Latius in the entry direction. That is, this could be another momentary lapse, as at 2.1.161/1060, since Titus' role in this long scene is not in fact prominent at all: he gives his information about Aufidius and on the page, and perhaps in the author's mind, disappears. While a significant character earlier in the play, he now no longer has anything specific to say or do; he is given no exit direction. Modern editors, and producers, usually leave him on stage to contribute shouts to the patrician cause and general chaos; they take him off [ with others] at 3.1.252/1980, since some of the `Gentry' and senators apparently leave then, but F provides specific exits for only Coriolanus and Cominius.[42] If Titus and his bit of information were not upppermost in Shakespeare's mind as he built to the first climax, the breakdown of the Roman political process, then Latius might have found its way into the entry direction. If the variable SHs in other plays thought to be set from foul papers are indicative of Shakespearean practice, or the decremental SHs in Sir Thomas More (other, oth, o; or Lincolne, Linco, Linc, Lin), the original manuscript SHs may have been severely abbreviated.[43] The five Latius SHs on bb1v might then be a scribal attempt to fill out that form or forms (possibly as brief as La or L) by copying the one full spelling in the
Backtracking slightly to establish Compositor A's work habits may help clarify the grounds of the argument here and lend support to the case for scribal copy. On his first page of Coriolanus, aa4, Compositor A's use of the full form SHs of both Lartius and Martius (and of Brutus on aa5v and aa6),[45] longer forms than B for Auffi. or Auffid. and Sould. (B sets Auf. and Sol. or Soul.), as well as his departure from his usual spelling preference for blood to set instead two bloud and one bloudie,[46] all suggest a cautious new-comer's attempt to follow unfamiliar copy; he also here prints one of the play's two Omnes SHs.[47] If I am correct, the scribe expanded and regularised his author's various SH abbreviations. Compositor A, at least initially, fairly conscientiously follows suit; on aa4 he experiments with abbreviations only for the longer SHs which obviously could not be accommodated to F's two-column format. By 3.1 (bb1v), however, he had set five and one-quarter of his seven and one-quarter pages, and his earlier full SHs now tended toward shorter forms: Brut., Cor. and Corio. (but no longer Coriol.). Yet Compositor A had not attended to Coriolanus for some period of time, since after bb4v a good deal of other F work intervened.[48] While he remembered and abbreviated Brutus to Brut., his only prior acquaintance with Titus as a speaking character on stage had been on his very first page, aa4. By the time he set bb1v, Compositor A had either forgotten or was now unsure about Lartius/Latius, and he followed the scribal expansion to Latius for each instance, as he had on aa4 when faced with new characters. That Compositor B, who moves immediately to shortened forms on his first page, aa3v ( Lar. and Lart.), should among ten Mar. and one Mart. on that page include a Martius might suggest that his copy, too, presented him with fuller SH forms.
Thus while Compositor A was quite capable of himself lifting the SD Latius from the entry direction for 3.1, rather than the scribe I have posited, the other full-form
In the series of SHs for Coriolanus on aa5, Thomas Clayton has seen the decremental prefixes characteristic of Hand D in More, and he takes the similarity as evidence that the manuscript copy for F Coriolanus was Shakespearean holograph.[49] This is one of the very few pages on which such a claim could be based, but since it also offers spellings and sophistications not connected with Compositor A's practice elsewhere,[50] it seems advisible at least to consider alternative explanations. Certainly this page, especially in the second column, is replete with errors, many of which appear to derive from misreading, but some at least might as easily be scribal as compositorial: Latius for Lartius in the SD at TLN 1060, Com. for Cor. at TLN 1087, and possibly the mislineation of Coriolanus' first two speeches as prose and the duplicate Martius Caius in TLN 1066-67. (Mislineation from TLN 1088 to the bottom of the page is clearly compositorial, stretching copy to waste space.) While this is Compositor A's third page, it is the first on which he needs SHs for `Coriolanus', and what look like `Shakespearean' decremental prefixes may be connected with Compositor A irregularly working toward his own preferred form. He sets Herauld in full, then two Coriol., each of which heads verse set as prose. Whether he or the scribe was responsible for the mislineation here, perhaps the look of these long lines, coupled with the fact that the intervening SH is Com., convinced Compositor A he was going to need a shorter form to accommodate long verse lines. (He had adopted the short form Com. immediately on aa4, his first page, probably because Cominius' first two speeches there begin with long lines.) The next Coriolanus SH is Corio., followed by three Cor., although none of these lines presented problems with justification. On Compositor A's next page with this SH, aa6, the first two instances are Coriol. again, but at TLN 1288 a long first verse line pushes him to Corio., and this becomes his preferred form, from which he departs only twice (one Cori. required for justification on bb1, one random Cor. on bb1v).
Compositor B's practice on his first page with Coriolanus SHs (aa6v) is puzzling, but, while he is much less trustworthy in reflecting copy spellings than A, one feature suggests that Coriol. was at least the usual copy form. He sets one Corio., one Coriol., then seven Corio. However, when the first group of citizens in 2.3 exits and the second enters, at TLN 1475, his treatment of both citizens and Coriolanus changes anomalously. The citizens are reduced to numbers, where previously on this page they had been `I. Cit.', `2. Cit.', etc.; although B is under no apparent pressure to stretch his copy here, Coriolanus
Even more unShakespearean than the copy's full- or long-form SHs that I am positing, but cannot prove, are the two instances of the SH Omnes demonstrably there (1, noted above, set by Compositor A at 1.9.67/823 on his first page, 1 by B at 4.6.138/3065). As a SH, Omnes is extremely rare in F: its only other occurrences are in Antony and Cleopatra (6: 2 set by Compositor E, 4 by B).[51] Whether Omnes appeared consistently in the manuscript and was almost completely purged in the printing house, as is possible, we cannot tell; the usual SH in substantive Shakespearean texts (and Hand D's practice in More), however, is All. Coriolanus has an extraordinarily high number of `crowd' speeches: 30 All SHs, not counting the lightly differentiated All Lords, All Consp., All Ple., All People. It would not be surprising that with so many to set, each compositor should have let one slip through on a page with no other All SHs to alert him.[52] An alternative explanation would be that a printing house editor went over the copy first, marking it to bring it into conformity with the general style decided on for F (which seems to have allowed Omnes to stand in exit directions but not as a SH), and missed these two instances, which both compositors then dutifully reproduced. In either case, Omnes is likely to have been the copy's form, and this suggests scribal sophistication rather than Shakespearean autograph.
The latter explanation might seem better to fit the oddity produced by Compositor B in the exit direction at 3.3.135/2424: Exeunt Coriolanus, Cominius, with Cumalijs. This (misread) Latin sophistication, too, seems to have been against Jaggard's house style: the only other F instance is the Cumalijs in Hamlet in the entry direction for 2.2, also set by Compositor B. (What was a Cum Alijs in Q2 Hamlet at 1.2.0.3, in F has become Lords Attendant.) It looks as though the Coriolanus manuscript copy had been marked,
The last feature of Coriolanus to be considered is not certain evidence of scribal origin, but it seems appropriate to discuss it in this section: the fact that Coriolanus is divided into acts (although not, after Actus Primus. Scoena Prima., into scenes). For public theatre plays written before about 1607 this feature, along with the Finis that follows the printed text, is usually taken to indicate the sophistication of a scribe or, possibly, later annotation for stage or publication.[55] Private theatre plays were regularly marked with act division, since noting the intervals in which music or dancing took place was a significant feature of their playbooks; later public theatre plays also show this mark of sophistication. If composed in 1608, Coriolanus falls into a transitional stage in the practice of dividing public theatre plays into acts: before 1607, in plays for the adult companies only Jonson's are so divided; by about 1616 the practice is universal.[56] Gary Taylor dismisses as unlikely the explanation that a sudden change in fashion led London publishers to impose their own act division when presented with undivided theatrical copy; rather, he argues for a change in theatrical practice — from continuous playing to
Although the King's Men did not start playing at Blackfriars until late 1609 or early 1610, Coriolanus may be the first of Shakespeare's plays composed with it in mind as a potential venue, an indoor theatre where act intervals were a common practice. Unlike the scenic construction usual in earlier Shakespeare plays, even as recently as Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus seems structured in a five-act movement: exposition and Coriolanus' military success, ending with Shakespeare's addition to Plutarch, a scene in the Volscian camp in which Aufidius announces his envy and intention to defeat Coriolanus by `wrath or craft'; Coriolanus' triumphal return to Rome, nomination to the consulship, and the plebeians' initial confirmation, ending with the tribunes convincing the citizens to rescind their vote; Act 3's descent into near civil war and, on the tribunes' urging, Coriolanus' banishment; in Act 4, Coriolanus' defection to the Volscians, Rome's reception of the news that both Aufidius and Coriolanus are joined against it, concluding with Aufidius' analysis of Coriolanus' character and vow to destroy his present co-general; finally, the series of pleas for mercy by friends and family that culminates in Coriolanus' confrontation with his mother and decision to spare Rome, followed by Aufidius' long-predicted revenge, the murder of Coriolanus.[58] Indeed, two of what I suspect to be scenes added or at least expanded in the process of revision (the final scene of Act 1 and, especially, the final scene of Act 4) accentuate the formal breaks by returning to Aufidius; they strengthen the contrast between him and Coriolanus and focus our attention on questions of character rather than physical prowess. These unPlutarchan scenes also counterpoise the protagonist's apparent progression throughout each of these acts toward acknowledged superiority and public acclaim, first in Rome and then among the Volscians. Acts 2 and 3 are virtually continuous in action but so structured that Act 3 replays in a more desperate key Act 2's movement: apparent civic success cut short not only by Coriolanus' own behaviour but by the tribunes' stratagems. Whether the actual notations were first entered in the hand of the author, scribe, or playhouse annotator, Shakespeare composed Coriolanus so as to be playable with intervals that reinforced its structure.
Paul Werstine has argued against the hope fostered by R. B. McKerrow
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