“The price of one faire word”: Negotiating Names in Coriolanus
Lucking, David
Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (April 1996)
Abstract
This essay considers some of the implications of the dense pattern of linguistic metaphors (consisting in recurrent allusions to words, speech, voices, etc.) to be found in Coriolanus, with particular attention being directed towards the issues of names and naming in this play. The argument is that the ambivalence attaching to proper names–the fact that they in some sense “belong” to the individual but depend for their status on a communal code and a public consensus–also surrounds the concept of personal identity itself, which is articulated by means of culturally situated systems of value and belief that are potentially manipulable and not necessarily consonant among themselves. One of the things that the play repeatedly illustrates is that the values in terms of which individuals define themselves are subject to negotiatory processes of which the market transaction is the paradigm. The self-idealizing protagonist of Shakespeare’s play considers himself superior to such processes, identifying both his intrinsic self and the agnomen which is the sign of that self with absolute values he believes he alone embodies, and seeking to discredit and disenfranchise those for whom words are essentially objects of barter. The irony of his position–and the ultimate cause of his downfall–is that in spite of himself, and very largely unknowingly, he participates in precisely those negotiatory practices he professes to despise, seeking to aggrandize himself through the codes of the community without acknowledging the real dynamics according to which those codes operate.
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