Renaissance eloquence and female exemplarity:Coriolanus and the matrona docta
Danielle Clarke
She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness1
Example is a bright looking-glasse, universall and for all shapes to looke into2
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a play about the relationships between eloquence,political power, and constructions of gender and the ways in which these areproduced in performance. Its key players, Coriolanus and Volumnia, are bothcelebrated for their rhetorical power, but each character discovers that lan-guage is an unstable and unreliable means of control, with the capacity toundo, as well as to make, reality. Coriolanus’ dominance is predicated onhis martial masculinity, yet this turns out to be another aspect of theperformativity of the self, a performance produced by the influence of hismother, Volumnia. If Renaissance culture required women to speak, toprofess, to acquire some learning in order to practise virtue within the house-hold, how might this impact upon and alter inherited ideals for womanhood?Given that maternity was one key discourse within which the transformativepotential of literacy, or the shift to the vernacular as a prestige dialect mightbe contained as well as exercised, what kinds of models might reinforce thiseffort? And what might the wider implications of women’s acquisition ofliteracy be for their relationship to the public sphere?3 How might thetransformative potential of literacy be contained, and social relations andhierarchies maintained?4 This article focuses on the reception of the matronadocta as one way in which the rhetorical category of the example is reinvigor-ated for new questions and new readerships, arguing that the recourse toexample was how Renaissance readers and writers sought to re-imagine therelationship of women to the public sphere. I look in particular at refractionsof the figure of Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, in a range of texts, includingthe figure of Volumnia in Coriolanus.
1 Proverbs 31: 26.2 Montaigne, trans. Florio, III. 351.3 See Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), Chap. 2.4 There is extensive evidence of the impact of literacy acquisition on gender relations. See for example,
Pierre Walter, ‘Defining literacy and its consequences in the developing world’, International Journal of LifelongEducation 18 (1999), 3–48.
Throughout the play, Coriolanus’ actions (and refusals of action) arelocked into a relationship of aggression and dependency with his mother,Volumnia. This is represented as a particular type of self-indulgent effeminacywhich is often seen as inimical to the proper exercise of governance: ‘he didit to please his mother and to be partly proud – which he is, even to thealtitude of his virtue’, but what is striking about this representation is that it isfocussed on the transfer of the mastery of eloquence from mother to son,from female to male, from ‘private’ sphere to public.5 His wife, Virgilia,functions as the obverse, representing the woman of virtue, modesty and soberspeech who will not venture beyond the household:
Val: Come, lay aside your stitchery. I must have you play the idle housewife withme this afternoon.Virg: No, good madam, I will not out of doors.Val: Not out of doors?Vol: She shall, she shall. (I. iii. 72–6)
Volumnia’s focus here on the world ‘out of doors’ hints at the ways in whichShakespeare has reconfigured her to reflect an emergent ideal of ambiguouslyvirtuous femininity, with a conflicted relationship to the public world, a rolethat reflects early modern interest in, and anxiety about, female power.6
Volumnia would, for many, recall the Roman figure of the matrona docta, afigure that had a particular resonance for Renaissance England as it struggledto reconcile inherited ideals for femininity with a series of new culturalmarkers for female virtue – notably literacy.
Examples for the emulation of virtuous women may be biblical as well asclassical in the model of exemplary reading which seeks to appropriate thepast to its own ends, as this passage commenting on the virtuous woman ofProverbs 31 illustrates. She is praised
for the wise, fruitfull and gracious speeches of her lips . . . she talketh not rashly,undiscreetly, or unreasonably of matters; but prudently and soberly . . . shespeaketh not of toyes, or of trifles, but of faith, of repentance, of the feare of
5 Coriolanus, (ed.) R. B. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), I.i.35–6. All citations are taken fromthis edition.
6 See Parker (ed.), Coriolanus, 22, on ‘how closely Volumnia has been recreated to conform to the patternof the traditional Roman matron’. On the relationship between space and gender, see Laura Gowing, Domes-tic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); BarbaraJ. Harris, ‘Women and Politics in early Tudor England’, Historical Journal 33 (1990): 259–81; Lena CowenOrlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On these issues specificallyin Coriolanus, see The New Cambridge Shakespeare, rev. edn., (ed.) Lee Bliss (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2010), sections by Bridget Escolme, in particular 101–2 and 109–11. On gender and the publicsphere more broadly in the period, see Danielle Clarke, ‘Gendering the Public/Private Divide in the Renais-sance’, in Karen Raber (ed.), The Cultural History of Women: Volume 3, The Renaissance (London: Berg,forthcoming).
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God, and of such other duties and points of religion, and she laboureth as muchas she can to provoke unto liberalitie, mercie, and weldoing7
The virtuous woman is not characterized by her silence, but by her activelyvirtuous eloquence, a form of work or labour, akin to her economic produc-tivity – spinning, tilling, making cloth, buying and cultivating land – outlinedearlier in the same book. Her ‘gracious speeches’ are a form of eloquence, asthey ‘provoke’ her household to morality and good works through exampleand persuasion. Cleaver’s commentary highlights the virtuous woman of Prov-erbs as a model for emulation within the household, aimed at husbands andwives alike.8 The early modern period’s interest in questions of character asrevealed by speech and language has profound implications for our reading ofgender in the period, not least because what women said (and whether andwhat they wrote) was governed by a complex web of ideologies about what was,and was not, appropriate speech, and by a culture of reception that routinelyused female speech (style and situation) as a means by which sexual status andhonour might be disclosed. In common with many other aspects of Renais-sance culture, female speech was received and judged in the context of avariety of inherited models – classical and biblical, positive and negative,popular and élite. These ideologies, I suggest, are more complex and nuancedthan criticism has allowed – they legislate for a wide range of situations andcannot be confined to binaries of speech and silence, and they are highlycontext specific, the dynamics of a power relationship often altering or shift-ing over the course of a relatively short exchange.9
Whilst there have been subtle readings of female speech in individual texts,by and large it has been assumed that the familiar examples disclose a cultur-ally agreed and relatively fixed meaning, evoking the stock of familiar exam-ples precisely because of the authority enshrined within them, and thusinferring that injunctions about female speech told an ahistorical and incon-trovertible truth that was not open to challenge. Yet this ‘representationreduced to absolute semiotic stasis’, as Hampton puts it, is the end product ofa highly sophisticated hermeneutic process, that of inductive logic as mani-fested in rhetoric as the example.10 This hermeneutic process is heavilyinvested in the reproduction of social models and ideologies, ‘[the exemplar]
7 Robert Cleaver, A Briefe Explanation of the Whole Booke of the Proverbs of Salomon (London, 1615), 553.8 See my forthcoming essay, ‘Gender and the Inculcation of Virtue: Biblical Exemplarity in Action’, in
Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher (eds.) Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture (Manchester:Manchester University Press).
9 See Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999), Chap. 2 and the discussion of the Paston letters in Seth Lerer, InventingEnglish: A Portable History of the Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 106–10.
10 See definitions in Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 4thedn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18, 32, 37, 62; for more theoretical accounts, see TimothyHampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1990), ‘Introduction’, and John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
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aids in processes of socialization, of the creation of norms of behaviour –procedures crucial to ideological hegemony and to practices ofsubjectivization’, although in his account this appears to be a primarily mas-culine phenomenon.11 Similar processes are at work in relation to femaleexemplars directed at readerships of both men and women, and these under-take significant cultural work that can only be understood and decipheredthrough the methods of rhetorically inflected reception. As with other ele-ments of rhetoric, examples prove to be a less than unequivocal way ofadvancing an argument, particularly where (as in the case of Cornelia) thereare multiple witnesses and sources that may be traced and consulted.
The standard exemplars of female virtue and vice are a rich source ofevidence, however complex, for our understanding of relationships betweengender and discourse. These cannot be taken at face value – figures such asHelen, Penelope, Hester or Cornelia do function metonymically, but they doso in a particular interpretive context and must be considered through theframework of genre, readership and rhetoric, as well as in relation to sourcematerials, which are often more frequently invoked than textually engagedwith – in other words, they do particular kinds of cultural work, rather thanbeing extensively historicized in the original humanist tradition of textualcriticism. For Penelope to encode chastity, a good deal of cultural and inter-pretive work has to be done, and a series of textual manoeuvres have to beundertaken for the ‘image of the exemplary ancient’ to function as ‘anideologeme – a fragment of discourse originally linked to a specific ideology,and moment of social relationships but later wrenched from its initialcontext’.12 Exemplarity involves a considerable degree of textual dynamism,and assumes an active engagement on the part of the reader with the materialon the page, as a prelude – in theory at least – to moral action. As Hamptonputs it, the use of the exemplum is ‘an attempt to reinterpret ancient historyand apply it to action in the world, to move beyond word to flesh).13 Asattitudes and expectations regarding women’s relationship to language – andto the written word in particular – changed, new models were required, andolder ones needed careful reinterpretation. The continuing investment in thesame set of exemplary figures suggests an attempt to maintain social relationsin a moment of ‘interpretive crisis’,14 a crisis which involves the question offemale linguistic agency through rising literacy, a spiritual injunction to learn-ing within the household, and a renewed attention to the cultivation of the‘image of the self’ constructed in relation to textually circulated exemplars.15
Whilst biblical and classical examples carried the authority of the past, chang-ing circumstances meant that that authority was often contingent at best, and
the rhetorical models that framed exemplarity meant that such topoi wereopen to interpretation, or as Wiseman says, ‘pressed to the needs of themoment’.16 As several critics have argued, the example starts to undergosignificant changes in the early modern period – the so-called ‘crisis of exem-plarity’ – new modes of signification come into play, and formal oratory comesunder pressure from emerging forms and genres.17
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Richard Brathwait in his text A Survey of History: Or, A Nursery for Gentry (1638)desires to provide his readers with appropriate models to emulate:
Their [compilers of histories] greatest ambition was, to magnifie truth: to cloathvirtue with her owne native habit, and discover the deformity of vice, were thesubject never so eminent, whereof they wrote.18
The text is a compendium of the works of several ancient historians, dedicatedto the Earl of Southampton, and to the Dowager Countess of Southampton.What is notable about the text is its investment in creating a ligature betweenthe ancients and the conduct of its implied readership, both male and female.Brathwait notes that the moral value attaching to the compilation of history isnot an exclusively masculine phenomenon, citing a long catalogue of worthyand learned women (‘Ladies much addicted both to perusing & compiling ofHistories’).19 Cornelia is allied specifically with a tradition of reading forexemplars:
The like inward beauty might be instanced in many other eminent Personages ofthat Sexe; whose excellent composures in this kinde survive the vading period oftime, as that virtuous Cornelia, mother to the victorious Gracchus; who, as she wasan Exemplar or Mirrour of goodnesse and chastity, so by the improvement of herEducation to her children, she exprest her selfe a noble Mother, in seasoningtheir unriper yeares in the studies of History, Poesy, and Philosophy.20
Some key elements of the transmission of Cornelia are present here, as she isheld up as a model for the English gentry to follow; her spotless sexualreputation, and the virtuous redirection of her learning into the education ofher sons. Her high social status is recast as moral status, as nobility attaches tothe quality of her mothering, rather than to her social class. This model of
16 ‘Exemplarity, women and political rhetoric’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds.), Rhetoric,Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2007), 129–48, 132.
17 The ‘crisis’ is by no means certain; see the cluster of essays in Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998),especially the essays by Hampton, Jeanneret, Rigolot, and Stierle.
18 Richard Brathwait, A survey of History: Or, A Nursery for Gentry (London, 1638), 16.19 Ibid., marg.20 Ibid., 17.
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female learning being most appropriately pressed into the service of theeducation of children is repeatedly replayed, not only in depictions ofCornelia, but also in encomiums in funeral sermons and accounts of theexemplary conduct of contemporary women.21 As Amanda Wilcox notes,immortality requires
transformation from individual social actor into an exemplum virtutis, whosemoment of glory is crystallized in anecdote, freed from context, and repeated inenough alternate textual loci that its survival was ensured.22
Jennifer Richards asserts that ‘[s]ince its inception, rhetoric has been thepreserve of a masculine elite’; many Renaissance educationalists confirm this,with their concentration on rhetoric as a pragmatic art adapted to service inthe public sphere.23 Authors concerned with female education in the periodtend to concur: ‘As for eloquence I have no great care/ nor a woman nedethit nat: but she nedeth goodness & wysdome,’ declares Vives.24 Even the mostliberal-minded of thinkers stumble over this question of purpose, beyond theinculcation of virtue and ‘ornament’ in women. Richard Mulcaster, whilstbestowing fulsome praise upon the achievements of English women, notesthat
Our [i.e. men’s] owne traine is without restraint for either matter or maner,bycause our employment is so generall in all thinges: theirs is within limit, and somust their traine be25
Like most Tudor educationalists, Mulcaster argues that education should beappropriate to the individual’s calling, not that it should enable social mobility(or the reform of gender hierarchies).26 But his experience dictates that thisposition can only be shakily maintained:
If all men used all pointes of learning well, we had some reason to alleadgeagainst wymen, but seeing misuse is common to both the kinds, why blame wetheir infirmitie, whence we free not our selves? Some wymen abuse writing tothat end, some reading to this, some al that they learne any waye, to some otherill some waye (175)
21 See Danielle Clarke, ‘Life Writing’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford History of Prose (Oxford UniversityPress, forthcoming) and Margaret Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’sLife Writing’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (eds.), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early ModernEngland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 33–48.
22 Amanda Wilcox, ‘Exemplary Grief: Gender and Virtue in Seneca’s Consolations to Women’, Helios 33(2006), 73–100, 80.
23 Richards, Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 2008), 70.24 The instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London, 1529), sig. Ev–E2r.25 Mulcaster, Positions (London, 1581), 174.26 See Lawrence Stone, ‘Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900’, Past and Present 42 (1969), 69–139.
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The contradictions and paradoxes in Renaissance educationalists’ prescrip-tions for women’s learning stem from the functionalist attitude that educationis a means to the inculcation of social and cultural norms, not a means bywhich an individual may learn to critique or challenge them. How are thesesocial roles to be maintained and reproduced? One means by which socialmores are prescribed and circulated is the example, necessitating at least aninformal acquaintance with those processes of reasoning and expression thatappear to be denied to women. Although women are deemed to fall outsideof rhetorical training in the formal sense, they are nevertheless expected to bebound by its morals, values and methods, and it is clear that through theelevation of particular exemplars they too are to engage in the motivatedimitation of these figures to the end of producing appropriate ‘action’ in theirdaily lives and conduct.
Female examples are interpellated in the transmission of rhetoric andeloquence and attendant notions of stylistic and moral worth and value.Although female exemplae may be intended at some level as models for womento emulate, by and large, their modes of transmission mean that they are morefrequently consumed by men. In Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman, imme-diately after his proscription of eloquence for the ideal woman, he states
Nor I wyl nat here condempne eloquence/whiche both Quintilian/& sayntHieronyme folowyng hym say/ was preysed in Cornelia the mother of Gracchus/& in Hortentia ye doughter of Hortentius (E2r)
Vives returns repeatedly to the figure of Cornelia, ‘a favorite paragon of his’,according to his translator, and she recurs frequently in rhetorical treatises, indidactic texts directed to women, and in laudatory compendia, such asHeywood’s Gunaikeion (1624).27
Cornelia’s prominence as an exemplar, variously, of female eloquence,virtue, motherhood, widowhood and education, owes a great deal toQuintilian’s centrality to Renaissance discussions of rhetoric. Cornelia’sauthoritative ethos is derived as much from the Institutio Oratoria’s pre-eminenceas a rhetorical treatise as it is from Cornelia herself. Quintilian writes
As regards parents, I should like to see them as highly educated as possible, andI do not restrict this remark to fathers alone. We are told that the eloquence ofthe Gracchi owed much to their mother Cornelia, whose letters even today testifyto the cultivation of her style.28
Quintilian positions Cornelia’s eloquence in the context of her role as wifeand mother; this praise occurs at the very beginning of the Institutio, and it is
27 Charles Fantazzi (ed. and trans.) The Education of the Christian Woman: A sixteenth-century manual (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 18. This edition referred to as ‘Fantazzi’ throughout.
28 Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (Loeb, 1920), I.i.6 (23).
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clear that her exemplary virtue lies in the eloquence bequeathed to her sons,not in the inherent value of her linguistic prowess. The redaction of Cornelia’slearning into a discourse of maternity, where her skills and talents pass to sonsis also a feature of the ancient sources, as they refashion her reputation to turnher into ‘a model to upper-class women of later generations’.29 This passageoccurs immediately after Quintilian’s advice to parents regarding suitablenursemaids; their morality is important, but this is causally linked inQuintilian’s account with proper speech, recte tamen etiam loquantur (I. i. 5).This also posits a female point of origin for eloquence, acquired throughimitation (Has primum audiet puer, harum verba effingere imitando conabitur[I. i. 5]), and via linguistic transmission from nurse/mother to child/boy.Female eloquence is generative in a specifically reproductive sense, a crucialprecursor to the acquisition of the technical art of rhetoric. Quintilian, andsubsequent commentators, place female eloquence in a domestic and mater-nal context – this is not necessarily marginal, or apolitical even, but it doespowerfully suggest an exemplary context for female speech that is rarelychallenged either in classical or early modern texts.
Cornelia appears in texts central to the humanist curriculum: Plutarch,Cicero, Tacitus, Quintilian – and it is from these that Renaissance writersderive their interpretation of Cornelia as exemplary. Vives extols her as amodel of chastity,30 allied with her devotion to her husband, refusing toremarry after his death and preferring loyalty to her late husband to a royaltitle.31 Heywood tells of her reference to her children as ‘my jewels, my riches,and delights, nor with any gayer ornaments desire I to be beautified’.32 Cor-nelia is cited either as a way of heightening the reputation of a contemporaryparagon, or as part of a series of arguments advocating female virtue.Lodowick Lloyd, for example, in The Pilgrimage of Princes (1573) suggests that‘if Cornelia were alive, and hard of this hir fame,/ She with Hortensia wouldfrom Rome, to England viage frame’ (216), in order to pay homage to QueenElizabeth. Elsewhere, Cornelia’s name is synonymous with both eloquenceand maternity: ‘Mother of that worthie paire’,33 ‘doting mother’;34 ‘Corneliafor eloquence’.35
For Vives, Cornelia is the figure that most easily enables him to resolve hisunease about the relationship between female virtue and education; on theone hand, arguing the necessity of education to virtuous occupation and theproper bringing up of children; on the other, anxiously concerned about thepotential disruptions to chastity, morality, and the structure of families and
29 Emily A. Hemelrijk, Matrona Docta: Educated women in the Roman élite from Cornelia to Julia Domna (London:Routledge, 1999), 64.
30 Fantazzi (trans.), Education, 66.31 Thomas Heywood, Gunaikeion, or Nine Bookes of Various History Concerning Woman (London, 1624), 126.32 Heywood, Gunaikeion, 126. See also Fantazzi (trans.), Education, 269.33 J. A. Rivers, Jesus Praefigured (London, 1623), 27.34 Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, The virgin martir (London, 1622), V.i.35 Barnabe Rich, Brusarus (London, 1592), 68.
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the social order.36 This paradox is located on the ground of female speech andideas about propriety and virtue in speech, and might be summarized byVives’ assertion that
. . . hit is better to lacke a good thyng than to use hit yll. Nor a good woman wyltake no suche bokes in hande/ nor fyle her mouthe with them: and as moche asshe can/ she wyll goo aboute to make other as lyke her selfe as she may/ botheby doynge well/ and teachynge well: and also as far as she may rule bycommaudynge and charging (F2r)
Behind these injunctions lies the emphasis on the mother’s role in the for-mation of early habits in her children; and key here is the example she sets inher speech. Cornelia exemplifies the virtuous mother, using her learning tothe end of the bringing up of children within the household.37 In certaincircumstances, this pivotal role has political and national consequences, asVives argues, referring to the recapture of his native city of Valencia from theMoors and the importance of maternal influence in retaining identitythrough language:
James/the kyng of Aragone . . . he drove out the people/ and commaundedmen of Aragon/ and women of Ilerda to go dwell in hit. So the children thatcame of them bothe/ with all theyr posteryte/ kepte theyr mothers language:which we speke there unto this daye . . . Tyberius Gracchus & Gayus Gracchus/were counted the most eloquent men of Rome/ and they lerned it of theirmother Cornelia/ whose epistols were red in the olde worlde/ full of pureeloquence (I4r)
Here women’s proximity to the vernacular makes them a useful culturalforce – the implication being that through linguistic reconquest and con-scious preservation, Valencia will remain a Christian city. It is striking thatVives finds the evidence of Cornelia’s eloquence not only in the verbalconduct of her sons, but in her own written letters, as circulated throughthe ancient world.38
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Volumnia’s pivotal role in providing Coriolanus with an ongoing education ineloquence is Shakespeare’s addition to his source, and is, I suggest, an
36 Similar dilemmas are evident in Mulcaster’s Positions, dedicated to Elizabeth I.37 Vives quotes Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators: ‘in this spirit . . . that Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, Aurelia,
the mother of Caesar, and Atia, the mother of Augustus, presided over the upbringing of their children andraised them up to be leaders’ (Fantazzi (trans.), Education, 56). This passage is omitted by Hyrde.
38 See Judith Hallett, ‘Introduction: Cornelia and Her Maternal Legacy’, Helios 33 (2006), 119–47 for a fullaccount of the provenance, authenticity and authority of these letters.
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extended deep allusion to the figure of Cornelia.39 Plutarch draws attention toCoriolanus’ ‘orphanage’ as a way of arguing that a lack of paternal influencedoes ‘not hinder him to become an honest man’, yet
. . . on the other side for lacke of education, he was so cholericke and impatient,that he would yeld to no living creature: which made him churlishe, uncivill, andaltogether unfit for any mans conversation 40
The account of the Gracchi however inverts this formula:
in her widowehed lost all her children, but one Daughter . . . and Tiberius andCaius, whose lives we presently write. Those she so carefully brought up, that theybeing become more civill, and better conditioned, then any other ROMANES intheir time: every man judged, that education prevailed more in them, thennature.41
The Volumnia depicted in Plutarch does not exert extended influence overCoriolanus’ speech and political strategies in the way that she does in Shake-speare. Such extended influence is a feature of depictions of Cornelia fromthe late republic onwards, and is seen variously as unwarranted interferenceand as a sign of maternal devotion and virtue.42 Cornelia as an exemplaryfigure is multivalent. The example is not narrated through to its conclusion inall but a handful of versions, more usually being resolved into a small numberof key topoi.43 Bruto links Cornelia’s tutelage to the fate of the Gracchi:
For an example among a few notable and renowned women in learning, theyinduce Cornelia mother to Graches a Citizen of Rome, who as she taught herchildren to be no lesse seditious & violent than learned and eloquent, so sheeinstructed her daughter (as some grave learned Authors suspect) to kill herhusband, in whome consisted the magnificence and maiestie of the Empire44
Cornelia is used to demonstrate the dangerous, destabilizing potential ofeloquence – a position that finds an echo in Shakespeare’s figure ofVolumnia. Livy’s Romane historie, translated into English by Philemon Hollandin 1600, is a key intertext for the depiction of Volumnia, but also for the
39 See the account given in Hemelrijk, Matrona Docta, 64–71.40 Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, Compared, trans. Thomas North (London, 1579), 237.41 Ibid., 875.42 See the sources for each position cited in Hemelrijk, Matrona Docta, 262, n. 27 and n. 28.43 These include Tiberius’ refusal to kill the female snake (at the expense of his own life); Cornelia’s refusal
of Ptolemy; and the anecdote about her sons being her jewels.44 W. P. (trans.) Giovanni Bruto, The necessarie, fit, and convenient education of a yong gentlewoman (London,
1598), sig. F4r. See also Agrippa, On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, who cites the eloquence ofthe Gracchi (amongst others) as an example of how ‘mighty states [have] often been sorely vexed and oftencompletely destroyed’, in Wayne A. Rebhorn (ed. and trans.) Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 2000), 79; and de’ Conti, A Dialogue on Eloquence, ‘Who is ignorant of the great tumults in theRoman republic that the eloquence of the two Gracchi stirred up?’, ibid.,144.
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connection to the figure of Cornelia.45 Volumnia’s plea in V. iii draws heavilyon Plutarch’s account of the same speech, but it seems likely that Plutarch andLivy draw on a common source in their representation of Volumnia’s words(she is named Verturia in Livy). Livy’s account conveys more of the harsh andtesty tone of the speech in Coriolanus:
But the woman falling in steede of praiers into a fit of choller: Let me know . . .before I suffer thee to embrace me, whether I am come to an enemie or to asonne, whether I be in thy campe as a captive prisoner, or as a naturall mother. . . Couldest thou finde in thine heart to waste and spoyle that cou[n]trey whichbred thee, which fostered thee, and brought thee up?46
This passage finds a close echo in Plutarch’s account, where it is Coriolanuswho falls into ‘choller’ and these words are attributed to Volumnia:
Doest thou thinke it good altogether to geve place unto the choler and desire ofrevenge, and thinkest thou it not honestie for thee to graunt thy mothersrequest, in so weighty a cause? (Plutarch, 257).47
Judith Hallett, seeking to identify Cornelia’s ‘lost’ letters, speculates that theLivy passage might be Cornelia’s words, based on its verbal echoes and simi-larities to a letter attributed to her in Cornelius Nepos’ book on Latin histo-rians, a possibility compounded by the close parallels between Livy andPlutarch.48
If, as seems to be the case, these letters were largely accepted in the ancientand early modern world as authentic, it is possible that Shakespeare has thefigure of Cornelia in mind when rewriting the character of Volumnia. Thereare other allusions that ally Volumnia with Cornelia and the set of mini-narratives that are associated with her. Most of these occur in Act I, scene iii,the domestic scene that both establishes Volumnia as archetypal mother, andsuggests the ways in which she exceeds the limitations of that role. WhenVirgilia objects that Volumnia’s insistence on her son’s martial valour couldhave just as easily resulted in death, Volumnia replies: ‘Then his good reportshould have been my son. I therein would have found issue’ (I. iii. 20–21).This recalls the anecdote from Valerius Maximus where Cornelia refers to hersons as her jewels (haec, inquit, ornamenta sunt mea).49 Cornelia also bore twelvechildren, although only three survived to adulthood, which Shakespeare hasVolumnia allude to as she amplifies the praise of her son: ‘had I a dozen sons,
45 This account assumes that the date of composition for Coriolanus is 1608–9.46 Livy, The Romane Historie, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1600), 70.47 The corresponding passage in Coriolanus is V. iii. 149–56.48 Hallett, ‘Introduction’, quotes text and translation in full, 124–6.49 Quoted in Hallett, ‘Introduction’,122.
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each in my love alike’ (I. iii. 22). The accumulation of these allusions stronglysuggests that Cornelia is at least one important precedent for Shakespeare’sexploration of the eloquent woman.
Plutarch mentions the particular honour that Coriolanus felt he owed to hismother:
But Coriolanus thinking all due to his mother, that had bene also due to his fatherif he had lived: dyd not only content him selfe to rejoiyce and honour her, butat her desire tooke a wife also, by whom he had two children, and yet never lefthis mothers house therefore (239).
This cathected relationship is alluded to in various ways throughoutCoriolanus, and renders the final breach between Coriolanus and Volumnia allthe more painful and powerful. As Sicinius says, ‘He loved his mother dearly’(V. iv. 15). Throughout the play, Volumnia self-consciously reflects upon thenature and influence of eloquence, advising her son in his use of words andgestures (‘Pray be counselled’ [III. ii. 28]). This suggests the figure of thematrona docta as well as Cornelia. As Cicero notes
We have all read the Letters of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi; and aresatisfied, that her sons were not so much nurtured in their mother’s lap, as in theelegance and purity of her language.50
The figure of Volumnia is given considerably more verbal and politicalagency than is the case in Plutarch, where the idea of petitioning Coriolanusto abandon his invasion plans and to seek reconciliation is attributed toValeria:
through the inspiration . . . of some god above. Who havinge taken compassionand pitie of our prayers, hath moved us to come unto you, to intreate you in amatter, as well beneficiall for us, as also for the whole citizens in general: but toyour selves in especiall . . . and shall redounde to our more fame and glorie, thenthe daughters of the SABYNES obtained in former age, when they procuredlovinge peace, in stead of hatefull warre, betwene their fathers and their hus-bands. Come on good ladies, and let us goe all together unto Coriolanus, tointreate him to take pitie uppon us (25–6)
This inspired moment of entreaty is domesticated in Shakespeare’s rewritingand the visit of Valeria an attempt to bring Volumnia and Virgilia to a lying in(I. iii).
In Coriolanus, martial masculinity and domestic femininity are resistant toconfinement within antithetical and circumscribed spheres, such that each
continually impinges on the other.51 The clash between words and action, thedomestic and the political, is also powerfully gendered, yet Volumnia andCoriolanus represent not so much oppositional views of action/words orpolitics, but antithetical interpretations of the functions of rhetoric.Volumnia’s position changes throughout the course of the play, and Shake-speare also develops a specific speech-style for Volumnia’s set pieces, corralledas they are into scenes that take place in interior or liminal spaces, in contrastto the external field of action and public spaces in which Coriolanus partici-pates.52 Her self-defined role is to enhance her son’s reputation, and with it hispower, by deploying the image of the martial body for maximum rhetoricaleffect, ‘O, he is wounded, I thank the gods for it!’ (II. i. 118). This martialpower is posited as maternal in origin, as Volumnia eschews a model ofnurture in favour of a claim to status in her own behalf through the exploitsof her son. As she claims, ‘Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me,/But owe thy pride thyself’ (III .ii. 131–2); ‘Thou art my warrior,/I holp toframe thee’ (V. iii. 62–3).53 Volumnia’s efforts at shaping the public sphere aredirected through influencing her son’s verbal conduct and Shakespeare usesthis to reflect dramatically on the political and ethical dilemmas that rhetori-cal practice presents. For Volumnia, martial honour is the logical outcome ofmaternal nurture, the critical process of ensuring that a ‘man-child’ ‘prove[s]himself a man’ (I .iii. 16–17). But becoming a man is not a linear process, asVolumnia’s comparison between Hecuba’s lactating breasts and Hector’sbleeding forehead suggests. ‘My boy Martius’ (II. i. 97) is repeatedly returned,metaphorically, to his mother’s lap, as his rhetorical exploits falter and misstheir mark. Coriolanus associates the exercise of eloquence with truth, withintegrity, and with honour; for him, language is ethos, and words and actionsideally cohere, much as the ideal state does, with its less savoury moments (andmembers) hidden from view, dispensed with: ‘His heart’s his mouth./ Whathis breast forges, that his tongue must vent’ (III. i. 259–60). Here there is onlyethos, there is no logos, in stark contrast to Volumnia’s carefully calculatedseparation of ‘heart’ and ‘brain’ in III. ii:
Pray be counselled.I have a heart as little apt as yours,But yet a brain that leads my use of angerTo better vantage. (III. ii. 28–31)
Volumnia’s ambitions for her son conflict with the ethos she has instilled inhim, and he is initially surprised at her attempts to persuade him to show his
51 See Ann C. Christensen, ‘The Return of the Domestic in Coriolanus’, SEL 37(1997), 295–316.52 The relevant scenes are I. iii, II. i, III. ii, IV. ii and V. iii.53 The latter is one of many instances of mutual echoing between Coriolanus and Volumnia; at V. iii. 22–3,
he says ‘the honoured mould/ Wherein this trunk was framed’, as a periphrasis for the term ‘mother’.
Coriolanus and the matrona docta 13
wounds to the people.54 Coriolanus claims that words are not his medium: ‘yetoft/ When blows have made me stay I fled from words’ (II. ii. 69–70), andresists or refuses the standard terms of epideictic rhetoric:
I had rather have one scratch my head i’th’sunWhen the alarum struck than idly sitTo hear my nothings monstered. (II. ii. 73–5)
Coriolanus’ refusal to present himself in the forum prompts a clash ofrhetorical ideologies; on the one hand, his refusal to use language to doanything than convey integrity, and on the other Volumnia’s insistence on thenotion of language as a tool, as a medium that may be manipulated in theservice of a larger goal. In short, the two characters play out the philosophicaland ethical conflict over the function and purpose of rhetoric that dominatespublic discourse in the early modern period, with Volumnia’s position beingpowerfully associated with the feminine, both in origin and effect.
The scene where this conflict takes place (III .ii) is Shakespeare’s invention,and may reflect what were taken to be letters written by Cornelia to her sonGaius.55 Coriolanus exhibits a profound distrust of rhetoric, preferring whathe sees as ‘truth’ unadorned by style, despite the complex image clusters andmetaphors that he uses to delineate his contested relationship to the bodypolitic, ‘This was my speech, and I will speak’t again’ (III. i. 64). His refusal tocompromise is seen as a failure of rhetoric as much as it is a shortcoming ofcharacter, he ‘is ill-schooled/ In bolted language. Meal and bran together/He throws without distinction’ (III. i. 323–5). The term ‘bolted’ means‘refined’ or ‘sifted’ (Parker, 265, OED), but it is hard to rule out the implica-tion of the idea of style as a form of false embellishment, something supple-mental to meaning, or the sense of language as something that escapesrational control. As critics have noted, this scene is suffused with the languageof acting, and this has been interpreted as a reflection on anti-theatricality.56
This discourse seems to me to be less to do with Puritan anti-theatrical polemicthan with Coriolanus’ identification of this kind of rhetoric with his mother,and by extension, with effeminacy (also a feature of anti-theatrical stereotyp-ing of acting). Once Volumnia’s speech moves out of its allotted sphere, itbecomes problematically effeminizing, troped in terms of its capacity todeceive and derail masculine honour – these are the terms in whichCoriolanus unsuccessfully attempts to resist his mother’s persuasion in V. iii aswell: ‘Not of a woman’s tenderness to be/ Requires nor child nor woman’sface to see./ I have sat too long’ (130–32).
54 See Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), Chap. 6.55 Hallett, ‘Introduction’, 119–47.56 Eve Rachele Sanders, ‘The Body of the Actor in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006), 387–412. The
language of acting in the play is discussed by Parker (ed.), Coriolanus, 82–5.
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Integrity and expediency are pitted against one another in Act III, scene iias Volumnia ‘gives [Coriolanus] an elaborate lesson in the rhetoric andgestures of hypocritical public relations’.57 He draws attention to the incon-sistencies in Volumnia’s speeches in a way that is not true of other (male)characters in the play, and links this to her speech style: ‘The obscurity of thissentence arises from the logical contradiction Volumnia has landed herselfin’.58 It is her change of position that strikes Coriolanus first, and that he seesas betrayal:
(To Volumnia) I talk of you.Why did you wish me milder? Would you have meFalse to my nature? Rather say I playThe man I am. (III. ii. 13–16)
It falls to Volumnia to exercise her maternal authority to persuade Coriolanusto do what is politically necessary, much as Cornelia attempts to influence thetrajectory of her sons’ political careers. Her position is that rhetoric might beused to a false end, to deceive, or to bring about a desired political outcome,that it is as expedient as strategy in battle. Volumnia demonstrates with gestureas well as words how her son should present himself, in the dramatic exerciseof ethopoiea (‘thus far having stretched it – here be with them – /Thy kneebussing the stones’ [III. ii. 76–7]), in a speech which is itself full of stylistictricks and quirks designed to draw attention to Volumnia’s own skill inattracting her listener(s) – the energia of her language. When she states,‘action is eloquence’ (III. ii. 78), for example, the statement refers both to theprimacy of martial exploits in the play and to the fifth canon of rhetoric(pronuntiatio). Quintilian, for example, begins his discussion of delivery withthe statement ‘Delivery is often styled action . . . the first name is derived fromthe voice, the second from the gesture’ (Pronuntiatio a plerisque action dicitur).59
Volumnia’s speech focuses heavily on the body (recalling the corporealimages throughout the play) and underlines these by the repeated use ofparonomasia and other forms of punning: frown/fawn (69); bussing/business(77); eyes/ears (78–9); head/heart (79–80); hold/handling (82);power/person (88). The speech divides into two parts, one addressingprinciple, and the other practice, and Volumnia draws a careful distinctionbetween matter and style:
now it lies on you to speakTo th’ people; not by your own instruction,Nor by th’ matter which your heart prompts you,
57 Parker (ed.), Coriolanus, xx.58 Parker (ed.), Coriolanus, 268, n. 41–3.See also Parker’s note on ll. 75–88: ‘The syntax and grammar of this
long, parenthetically interrupted speech are confusing for the same reason’, e.g. that the logic of the argumentis confused.
59 XI. III.1; Loeb, Vol. 4, 243.
Coriolanus and the matrona docta 15
But with such words that are but roted inYour tongue, though but bastards and syllablesOf no allowance to your bosom’s truth. (III. ii. 54–59, my emphases)
Coriolanus’ reaction to this attempt to script his response to the crowd ispredictably hostile, but the terms of this hostility are telling. Not only does heview the demand that he should ignore his heart and speak expediently‘roted’ words as a form of class debasement (III. ii. 101–03), he also sees theuse of stylistic dissimulation as effeminizing:
Away my disposition; and possess meSome harlot’s spirit! My throat of war be turned,Which choired with my drum, into a pipeSmall as a eunuch or the virgin voiceThat babies lull asleep! (III. ii. 113–16)60
Volumnia’s plea in V. iii in many ways is a more prototypical representation ofan eloquent woman than her speeches earlier in the play, as she draws uponmore typically feminine arguments to make her case, citing the implication ofthe private sphere in the public and vice versa.61 Eloquence is allied withvirtue, refracted through the maternal, as Volumnia calls upon familial andkinship loyalties in order to secure the desired political result – begging thequestion of whether these bonds too are to be subordinated to expediency inthe same way as language is in III. ii. As Christensen has argued,
It is as his ‘private friend’ that Volumnia convinces her son to abandon hispolitical enterprise, upsetting traditional hierarchies between family and state,private and public, and the places of women and men within these structures.62
Shakespeare draws heavily on Plutarch’s account, down to specific echoes ofwords and phrases, but the speech takes the form of an extended plea orpetition (‘we will ask’, ‘hear us’, ‘persuade thee’ ‘our request’, ‘our suit’),explicitly endorsed by the patricians and it thus conforms to one of the veryfew positive models for female eloquence in the public sphere:
So that all hope is vain –Unless his noble mother and his wife,Who, as I hear, mean to solicit himFor mercy to his country – (V. ii. 70–73)
Yet the petition is not straightforward; it is an attempt to rehabilitateVolumnia as much as it is aimed at persuading Coriolanus, who is quite
60 Cf. Brutus’ speech in II.61 The marginal note calls it an ‘oration’, 256.62 Christensen, ‘The Return’, 297.
16 Danielle Clarke
clear that he will not be moved, but it is also a sustained attempt to regainpower over Coriolanus, ‘Nay, go not from us thus’ (V. iii. 132), to reclaim himfamilially. Volumnia unashamedly uses her private bond with Coriolanus tomake the larger argument (and this is of a piece with her view of rhetoricearlier in the play), it is, in Christensen’s words, ‘highly politicized “mater-nity” ’:63
Making the mother, wife, and child to seeThe son, the husband, and the father tearingHis country’s bowels out; and to poor weThine enmity’s most capital. (V. iii. 102–5)64
Either Coriolanus sacrifices his family, or his honour, ‘we must lose/ Thecountry, our dear nurse, or else thy person,/ Our comfort in the country’ (V.iii. 110–12), where the notion of patria as nurse revises the gendering of publicand private and further identifies Volumnia with the state (recall the nursingimage in I. iii) to which Coriolanus is both external and dependent. Sheargues
For myself, son,I purpose not to wait on fortune tillThese wars determine. If I cannot persuade theeRather to show a noble grace to both partsThan seek the end of one, thou shalt no soonerMarch to assault thy country than to tread –Trust to’t, thou shalt not – on thy mother’s wombThat brought thee to this world. (V. iii. 119–26)
This position shares further similarities with the letter attributed to Cornelia:the apparent subjugation of personal concerns to the greater good; theemphasis on the deep distress caused by the actions of a son; that the sonshould respect the feelings of the parent (‘keeping you from opposing me anddestroying our country’65); and the implication that these actions may onlybe carried out once the speaker is dead. This is reinforced as Volumniaconcludes her petition by enacting its failure: ‘Yet give us our dispatch./ I amhushed until our city be afire,/ And then I’ll speak a little’ (V. iii. 181–3).66
This too, is a calculated gesture of barely suppressed threat – and delivery ishugely important all through this scene, as meanings turn on the precisemeanings of kneeling, clasping of hands and so on.
63 Christensen, ‘The Return’, 301.64 See Hallett, ‘Introduction’, 125–6.65 Hallett, ‘Introduction’, 125.66 See Christina Luckyj, ‘Volumnia’s Silence’, SEL 31 (1991), 327–42, on Volumnia’s rhetorical strategies:
‘emotional pleas, political arguments, and feigned rejection. [In 3.2] She even rehearses her future role assupplicant by showing him how to plead’ (335).
Coriolanus and the matrona docta 17
The example here is ambiguous in its effects, and Volumnia’s attempts toinfluence events through the exercise of her private virtue stabilizes Rome,but at a heavy price. Volumnia’s plea on behalf of Rome is represented as aprofound threat to Coriolanus’ masculine identity; he attempts to dismiss her,but is enjoined to stay and listen – once more he is brought back intoVolumnia’s ambit; once more she calls upon him to speak: ‘Speak to me, son!(V. iii. 149); ‘Why dost not speak?’ (V. iii. 154); in the face of his commitmentto action, ‘Coriolanus does what he wills. His deeds are his identity’.67 In theend, in this most climactic of scenes, Coriolanus yields to his mother’s argu-ments in the full knowledge that this return to the maternal, to the feminine,ensures his own destruction. His capitulation to his mother’s feminine rheto-ric seals his fate, as Coriolanus well knows:
O mother, mother!What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,The gods look down, and this unnatural sceneThey laugh at. O my mother, mother, O!You have won a happy victory to Rome;But for your son, believe it, O believe it,Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,If not most mortal to him. (V. iii. 183–90)
The attribution of agency to Volumnia is telling, as it suggests maternal poweras threatening, as upsetting the natural order (‘this unnatural scene’),reflecting the ways in which the emergent figure of the verbally competentwoman mobilised anxieties about uncontained female power:68
But at his nurse’s tearsHe whined and roared away your victory,That pages blushed at him, and men of heartLooked wond’ring each at others. (V. vi. 94–102)
Coriolanus then, deploys the refracted example of Cornelia in order to considerthe consequences of the emergent and unresolved relationship between femi-ninity and eloquence. The play represents a complex and extended engage-ment with the question of the extent to which female influence within thehome might or should extend ‘out of doors’. For Coriolanus, the final momentof capitulation to his mother’s attempts to shape him, and continue hiseducation, marks a return firstly to the familial, and finally to annihilation.Throughout the play, the various interpretations of Cornelia are brought intoproductive tension, and the exemplar is used as a way to consider the political
67 Sanders, ‘Body’, 397.68 See Christensen, who argues that nascent capitalism, rather than changing speech regimes, led to a
situation where ‘anxieties surrounded women’s power to sustain families, not only through breast-milk, butthrough other social forms of authority as well’ (301).
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and ideological effects of female-led education. As the figures of Cornelia andher counterpart Volumnia demonstrate, female exemplars are integrallyinvolved in the formulation of ideas about style, rhetoric and ethics, and can beseen to figure centrally in the Renaissance’s understanding of relationshipsbetween private and public, as figured in the polis, the household and inhistorical narrative. Finally, and most importantly, female exemplars moveacross textual and cultural boundaries, becoming normative, but negotiatedauthorities for certain kinds of social positions, nodal points at which compet-ing ideologies about status, class, language and gender meet.
University College Dublin
Coriolanus and the matrona docta 19
Abstract
danielle clarke, Renaissance eloquence and female exemplarity: Coriolanus and thematrona docta
This article argues that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus draws on the powerful exemplaryfigure of Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, in its ambiguous depiction of the relation-ship between eloquence and femininity. By looking at ideas relating to the example,and at a range of depictions of Cornelia, the essay suggests that the manipulation ofthese images represents a response to emergent discourses relating to femininity, aswell as an engagement with the reception of classical rhetoric. As the figures ofCornelia and her counterpart Volumnia demonstrate, female exemplars are integrallyinvolved in the formulation of ideas about style, rhetoric and ethics, and can be seento figure centrally in the Renaissance’s understanding of relationships between privateand public, as figured in the polis, the household and in historical narrative. Shake-speare both addresses and complicates the standard equation between maternal virtueand eloquence by critiquing the incursion of feminine rhetoric into the public realmof politics and governance.
