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a plague-Tribunes for them Miss C. Porter (First Folio Sh.): Rowe's arrangement is objectionable because it makes a halting instead of a swift parentheses [see Text. Notes]. Martius, in character and speech alike, is a flame. This side flare of imprecation suffers, also, in the modernised text from being taken out of the parentheses. His thought recurs to the battle-charge, when he stemmed the flight of the ‘common file,’ cursing them as ‘you heard of Byles and Plagues.’ So here, between breaths, as it were, he wishes these unworthy clamorers for the privileges of the worthy Tribunes bringing down a plague. He says it in the quickest way possible—‘(a plague-Tribunes for them).’ The play shows, of course, that the ‘Tribunes for them’ did, indeed, bring down ‘a plague’ in a peculiar sense when they caused the people to banish Valor in his person later. Surely the formalisms of the eighteenth century have not so deadened the minds of this century that they cannot see how feeble in comparison is the modernised text: ‘a plague! Tribunes for them!’ Martius, as his poet makes him talk, hated the small words carrying no weight in the sentence as he hated the mob of weak men making up the ‘common file’ in number, not in valor.
William Shakespeare. Horace Howard Furness, Jr., A. B.; Litt. D. The Tragedie of Coriolanus. Philadelphia and London. J. B. Lippincott Company.
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