ABSTRACT
In Coriolanus, Shakespeare rewrites early modern friendship theory, associating it with a concept of hospitality that turns friendship’s emphasis on concord and amity into political liabilities. Depicting friendship as a form of hospitality, Shakespeare instead conceives the constitution of friendship as a political event that affirms antagonism and discord as irreducible dimensions of early seventeenth-century alternative political thought. In act 4, when Coriolanus arrives in Antium looking for Aufidius, the play stages the union between the two enemies as an event that embodies conventional friendship theory estranged by the force of hospitality that informs it. Coriolanus arrives in Antium seeking hospitality, calling his enemy’s home a “goodly city” (4.4.1), and the Citizen tells Coriolanus that Aufidius “feasts the nobles of the state” (4.4.8) as he directs him to his enemy’s “house” (4.4.10). The language between Coriolanus and the Citizen establishes Antium as a place of conviviality, inviting even to its enemy who has “made thy widows” (4.4.2) and made “[m]any an heir … groan and drop” even before battle (4.4.2-4). Greeting his enemy with open arms, Aufidius implores the Roman warrior to
Oh, come, go in, And take our friendly senators by th’ hands Who now are here, taking their leaves of me, Who am prepared against your territories, Though not Rome itself.
