Disowning the Bond. Coriolanus's Forgetful Humanism

On acknowledging defeat at the hand of Coriolanus, Aufidius, the Volscians’ general, swears unquenchable hate towards him and eternal war, even at the risk of treading on obligations made holy by such places as temples, the home, Capitol, the sites of shared rites and founding pacts, “[e]mbarquements all of fury”. Among such obligations, the leftover of “rotten privilege and custom” in Aufidius’s blasphemous words, we find the law of hospitality, or “the hospitable canon” as it is called by Aufidius (1.10.19-27). War will be as absolute as the unwritten law which forbids it within the walls of the home or the temple, the places where the wayfarer, the poor, the stranger, even the enemy ought to be given asylum and sheltered as one would a welcome guest. But this is by no means the only place in the text where the forgotten memory of hospitality surfaces as if from the crevices of a remote age, nor are enmity and hatred the only agencies for such a blasphemous disowning of the traditional bonds of piety and civility. For, in the previous scene of the same first act, in an episode which seems negligible in respect to the main course of the events, a banal form of amnesia (Freud would call it a “faulty achievement”, Fellheistung) has just prevented Coriolanus from repaying his debt of gratitude for the hospitality he received in the past from a Volscian soldier (1.9.77-89). How might we interpret this amputated, or unresolved gesture of gratitude? And how does it call attention, for all its irrelevance, to both Coriolanus’s tragic self and to his public role as a governor? Drawing on the ethical perspective Shakespeare’s contemporaries might find stored in Latin classic humanism (mostly in Ovid and Seneca) and the ways in which Coriolanus’s forgotten obligations both complied with and inverted the mainstream Renaissance Italian interpretation of tragedy, this essay reassesses the place of the play in the context of early modern literary and self-fashioning humanism. This essay explores the ways in which the theme of violated hospitality in Coriolanus – so far largely overlooked – is shaped, contrastively, by such ancient moral issues as memory, gratitude, and reciprocity. Del Sapio Garbero’s suggestion is that Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well Seneca’s treatise De Beneficiis (both of them translated by Arthur Golding), can offer us a way to understand the extent to which such issues were part of Elizabethan culture, as well as of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination at a moment of deep historical and cultural change. But what is also underlined in this essay, is the radical nature of the issues elicited by Shakespeare, by considering the ways in which they are resumed and catalysed in our contemporary critical debate (Ricoeur, Derrida, Caillé, Godbout).