ABSTRACT
The banished Coriolanus’s declaration of independence, his attempt to “stand / As if a man were author of himself,” has already failed. He will not resist the pleas of his kin to spare his native Rome, and in these words of defiance, Shakespeare, as the real author of Coriolanus, marks his failurewith that bathetic “As if”—as a tragically ironic joke. For the world of the play, and perhaps for Shakespeare himself, attempts at self-authorship are dangerously hubristic and even absurd. As a fictional character, Coriolanus is authored not by himself, but by Shakespeare, and as a man, he is defined by his community, given one name by his mother and a second by his city, the two dominant agents in his life that do prevail upon his instinct and convert his doomed attempt to stand as a self-author into a tragic death.
