Marcius continues to rail, denouncing them as utterly untrustworthy. He says:
Trust ye?
With every minute you do change a mind,
And call him noble that was now your hate,
Him vile that was your garland.
- Act I, scene i, lines 182-85
This is, of course, a standard complaint against the common people; that they are fickle and unreasoning. This dates back to the Greek historians, who showed that the Athenian democracy was subject to radical changes in its policies and that Athenian politicians suffered drastic changes in fortune at the hand of the fickle public-in contrast to the steady policies of Sparta, which was certainly no democracy. (And yet who would prefer the death-in-life of Sparta to the brilliance of Athens?)
Roman writers referred to the mobile vulgus ("fickle multitude") and about half a century after Shakespeare's death this was abbreviated to "mob," a word now used for any dangerous and disorderly crowd of people. Had Shakespeare had the use of the word it would undoubtedly have appeared somewhere in this speech.
In Elizabethan England, with its strong oligarchy, the view of the public by "gentlemen" was very much like the view of the Roman patricians. Shakespeare himself was born of a prosperous middle-class family and certainly held himself superior to those he considered plebeian. Furthermore, he was patronized by the aristocracy and liked to identify himself with them.
When, therefore, he had occasion to speak of the common people, he was rarely kind or sympathetic. He makes much of their dirtiness, greasi-ness, and bad breath. And he is never quite as unkind to them as in this play. This is one reason why Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare's more popular plays in modern times. His social views embarrass mid-twentieth-century America.
It may be that Shakespeare is antiplebeian in this play partly because of the conditions in England at the time the play was written. The unpopular Scottish king, James VI, was on the English throne now as James I and there was a rising clamor against him. Voices from below were beginning to be heard against James's theory of absolute monarchy and against his contention that decisions in religion were entirely in the hand of the King. Those voices were to grow louder until (a generation after Shakespeare's death) they led England into revolution and James's son to the headsman's ax.
If Shakespeare was writing with at least part of his attention fixed on securing the approval of the aristocratic portion of his audience, on whose approval so much depended from an economic standpoint, this was the time for harsh words against the commons. The application would be seen.
The amazing thing, though, is that with all the animus against the commons which Shakespeare possesses, for both personal and economic reasons, he does not therefore make Marcius sympathetic. His integrity as a writer and his hatred of war forces Shakespeare to display Marcius' reaction to the commons as an overreaction, and the patrician champion loses us at the very start.
His response to the cry of the people for food, to their protest that they are starving, is:
Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,
And let me use my sword, I'd make a quarry
With thousands of these quartered slaves, as high
As I could pick my lance.
- Act I, scene i, lines 198-201
We are acquainted, of course, with people who think the proper answer to the protesting poor is the policeman's club, the cattle prod, and the gun. Such people are difficult to like, and Marcius is one of them.
Five tribunes. ..
But then Marcius must grumble forth the news that the patricians have not done as he would have liked them to do. They have compromised instead and granted the plebeians a new kind of officer. Marcius describes them as:
Five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms,
Of their own choice. One's Junius Brutus-
Sicinius Velutus, and-I know not.
'Sdeath! The rabble should have first unroofed the city,
Ere so prevailed with me...
- Act I, scene i, lines 216-20
It was the grant of the tribunes, rather than Menenius' fable, that brought the plebeians back to Rome. The tribunes were officials drawn from the plebeian ranks and elected by the plebeians only. Their purpose was to safeguard the interests of the plebeians and to keep the patricians from passing laws they felt would be unfair to the common people. Eventually, indeed, the tribunes gained the power of stopping laws they disapproved of by merely crying out "Veto!" ("I forbid!"). Not all the power of the government could pass a law against a tribune's