168 Ideals in the Modern World
In Plutarch’s account of Coriolanus, he is beloved by his mo ther
and loving. But Shakespeare takes this matter further, making
Volumnia a major fi gure in the play. She controls her son— dominates
and oppresses him in ways that Plutarch does not even hint at.
Almost as much as Macbeth is dominated by his wife, Coriolanus is
dominated by his mo ther. Again there arises the question: Is courage
a noble virtue? Or is courage a form of compensation for defects?
Macbeth’s defect may well be impotence. In the case of Coriolanus,
the defect is that of never having grown up—of being a boy, and
sometimes a “boy of tears.” Is courage at bottom merely a way to
win a wife or a mo ther’s love?
Shakespeare almost always tends to bring identity back to the
family. We get to know the intimate lives of almost all his protago-
nists, and we see that they are defi ned by what they experienced at
home. As Schopenhauer says, the apple doesn’t usually fall far from
the tree in the plays. Identity is familial, the plays often insist.
Recall how much the life of the Soul is at variance with the life of
the family. The individual in the State of Soul— thinker, saint, or
warrior—is prone to leave the family and strike out on his own.
He will not let his identity be determined by the circumstances of
birth and upbringing. Freud’s insistence that we are who our fami-
lies make us— that radical self- reinvention is largely impossible—is
in many ways affi rmed by Shakespeare. Coriolanus is his mo ther’s
son; Laertes the true child of Polonius; Hal the emanation of
Bolingbroke; the list could continue on and on. Though there are,
to be sure, exceptions: large- hearted Juliet bears almost no resem-
blance to her vulgar, feuding family.
In The Iliad, Thersites, the misshapen soldier who rails at Agam-
emnon and the other heroes, has twenty- fi ve lines. In Shakespeare’s
most Homeric play, Troilus and Cressida, Thersites has about
ten times that number. Here, with the assistance of Thersites,