Coriolanus

Eating and consumption are major motifs throughout Coriolanus, representing the destructive impacts of anger. The play opens with a riot caused by a lack of food. The plebeians protest against the senate because of a grain shortage, demanding that storehouses be opened up instead of saved for an emergency. While the citizens of Rome are literally protesting due to hunger, they perceive the senate as the consuming entity, feeding upon the common people. One citizen claims, “If the wars eat us not up, they will; / and there’s all the love they bear us” (1.1.87-88). Likewise, Menenius views the plebeians as the consumers during his exchange with the tribune Sicinius:

MENENIUS. Pray you, who does the wolf love?

SICINIUS. The lamb.

MENENIUS. Ay, to devour him, as the hungry plebeians

would the noble Martius (2.1.7-10).

Both the plebeians and the patricians see the other side as having an excessive appetite that causes them to consume what they hate.

Anger, aggression, and dominance are all described using the metaphor of eating. Shakespeare describes Coriolanus’s ferocity in battle as a form of eating up his enemies. One of Aufidius’s servants remarks that Coriolanus has defeated their general before and claims that if he “had been cannibally given / he might have boiled and eaten him too” (4.5.208-209). Eating another person is portrayed by these lines as the ultimate act of dominance over another.

However, Shakespeare also suggests that rage as a form of appetite can be self-destructive as well. Coriolanus’s anger against the tribunes ends up consuming his political ambitions rather than dominating them. Similarly, Volumnia states that her inability to forgive the people for banishing her son will result in an act of auto-cannibalism: “Anger’s my meat. I sup upon myself / And so shall starve with feeding” (4.2.68-69). Her words are paradoxical, indicating the irony that the more anger she consumes, the closer she actually comes to starvation. Likewise, when Coriolanus protests against giving the tribunes authority, he warns the senate, “I say they nourished disobedience, fed / The ruin of the state” (3.1.151-153). The metaphor of feeding ruin suggests the way that giving into appetite can destroy a society. Through this motif, Shakespeare explores the idea that anger is a form of destructive consumption that will ultimately lead to starvation, just as the plebeians rioting for grain may lead to famine later when the stores are depleted.