William Shakespeare, Critical Commentary of The Tragedie of Coriolanus
Horace Howard Furness, Jr., A. B.; Litt. D., Ed.

Brothers Guard Keightley (Expositor, p. 361): With the fullest conviction I read for ‘brother's guard’ household hearth; for that was the very place where he did find him. ‘He got him up straight to the chimney hearth, and sate him down’ (North's Plutarch). Besides, we never hear that Aufidius had a brother; and it should be under, not ‘upon,’ the guard; a man is, or stands, on his own, not on another's guard. In Rich. II: IV, i, [282] we have ‘under his household roof’; and household hearth occurs in Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming, iii, 17. [In both his editions, 1864 and 1865, Keightley records this reading, which later, in his Expositor (1867), became of ‘fullest conviction,’ merely as a conjectural reading. As to Keightley's objection that this should be under, not ‘upon’ guard, of which he says there are no examples, Wright, following Johnson's interpretation of the foregoing words, quotes in illustration: ‘The messenger Came on my guard,’ Ant. & Cleo., IV, vi, 23, i. e., while I was on guard. The quotation given by Steevens, ‘The lieutenant watches tonight on the court of guard,’ is not, I think, apposite; ‘the court of guard’ means the court where the guard is placed, as is shown by Othello's words in a later scene, ‘In night and on the court of guard and safety’ (II, iii, 216).—Ed.]