SOURCE: “Volumnia's Silence,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 31, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 327-42.

In the following essay, Luckyj reviews the ways in which Volumnia's silence following her successful plea to Coriolanus to spare Rome has been interpreted. Noting that Volumnia's character is often viewed in extremes (her silence is alternately interpreted as triumphant or devastated, for example), Luckyj argues that Shakespeare provides enough evidence to suggest that Volumnia's motivation is “complex and open-ended.”

Volumnia's last appearance in Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a brief and silent one. She has just pleaded successfully with her son to spare his native city from intended destruction; her plea, we know, must result in his death at the hands of the Volscians, whose cause he has betrayed. She passes wordlessly over the stage in the company of Virgilia and Valeria as a Roman senator hails her as “our patroness, the life of Rome...