The climax of Coriolanus

George Barnam notes the careful structure of Act 5 of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “Shakespeare had used this scene structurally to build the tension toward the climactic moment when Volumnia should appeal to her son and prevail. Three appeals are made to Marcius, and Shakespeare’s presentation of them matches in structure the dramatic importance of each. The balance has been carefully made. We do not see Cominius make his plea, but hear the details of it in a scene of some seventy-five lines (V.i). We see Menenius rejected in a scene of 117 lines, the first 60 of which consist of the banter between Menenius and the guards (V.ii). The climactic scene takes more than two hundred lines (V.iii). The dramatic effect of the hierarchical arrangement is rather like that of the battle of angels in Paradise Lost , which builds up to the third day, when the Son emerges and easily drives Lucifer and his band into ruin.”

In John Dennis’s adaptation, however, this structure is lost, and Menenius in particular escapes with his dignity intact. We don’t see Menenius deal with common soliders, nor does the play depict Marcius’ rejection of him. It is reported, but “Dennis does not permit Menenius to lose the dignity and demeanor of a Roman senator.” To Johnson’s observation that buffoons were as common in the Senate as elsewhere, “Dennis would surely have replied that though it might be so it ought not to be,” and the dramatist’s job, apparently, was to depict ideal types that behave according to their status.