Coriolanus: The Anxious Bridegroom

In Coriolanus, Shakespeare adapted a plot from North's translation of Plutarch's Lives into an intensive exploration of a pathological mother-son relationship. It is the story of a son who attempts to rebel against his mother, to whom he has been inordinately attached. The son is ultimately destroyed when he renounces his rebellion and submits to his mother. In this paper, I wish to examine certain aspects of the play for the unconscious fantasies which may have determined the handling of the narrative material from which Shakespeare worked. In particular, I suggest that an examination of the wedding night references in the play is essential for an understanding of the work on a psychoanalytic level.

The play has sometimes been cited as peculiar among Shakespeare's works. Critics discern a “slackness” in Shakespeare's dramatic power (2, 3, 8). This slackness is supposed to be reflected in the way in which Shakespeare handled his source material. If we compare Shakespeare's adaptation with the original in North's translation, we find at several points an almost slavish closeness to the source. This dependence on North is so extensive that at first reading, the play seems little more than a simple dramatization of the plot from North (4, 11, 13, 14). Editors have been able to make emendations and fill textual lacunae in the play by referring to North, so faithfully has Shakespeare followed his source. The later acts of the play, especially, show a marked increase in borrowing, and tend to rely almost exclusively on North. Shakespeare might, of course, have been under some merely temporal pressure to complete the play, but this marked change in the processing of the material could also have been due to the conflictual nature of the subject matter. At any rate, Shakespeare seems to have adhered doggedly to his source in order to finish his task.

Yet, the earlier acts and the characters introduced there involve a good deal of revision and reworking of the material. Shakesp