Coriolanus

[poliphilo]

Coriolanus is a thin play. Faced with the problem of making a tragic hero out of a stupid bully-boy, Shakespeare loads the dice against his man's antagonists by rendering them as characterless stereotypes of mean-spiritedness (the tribunes, Aufidius) and sheeplike inconstancy (the citizens). In his best plays, Shakespeare makes sure even the walk-on parts are worth the attention of a good actor. In Coriolanus most of the cast are cyphers. 

If Macbeth has too much imagination for politics, Coriolanus has too little. The one is soused in poetry and inwardness, the other never saw a butterfly he didn't want to mammock. This is a fast play, with no soliliquies to hold up the action.  We open on an uprising, proceed to a war and then straight into an election. I've never seen it acted, but I can imagine it's a thrill ride. 

What price honour if your fixation on it turns you into that least honoured thing- a traitor? What price patriotism when you hate the people who "are the city"? What price family values when they produce such brutes?  For all its action-packed swiftness, Coriolanus is a relentlessly bleak play.  Is there anything good to be said about these people, their institutions, their values? 

Comments

[sovay]

I've never seen it acted, but I can imagine it's a thrill ride.

I saw a very good production of Coriolanus by the Actors' Shakespeare Project in Somerville in 2009—it turned that spareness, the personal and political bleakness into a feature of the play, not a bug. With no romances, no bits of business, and a hero who lacks even the self-awareness to soliloquize, it becomes a play of ideas rather than the language out of which Shakespeare builds so many of his worlds, so that I am not at all surprised that Brecht at one point decided to write a modern version and even less surprised that it remains unfinished partly because he found Shakespeare had already gotten in most of his favorite effects before him. It's a very alienating play. It's a very classical play, not simply because it's set in fifth-century Italy: Coriolanus' conflict of honor would make more sense to Aeneas or Achilles than it does to a modern audience. And he is more badly damaged than any other Shakespearean hero I can think of, less sympathetic than even some of the villains; like the rest of the play, he's so stripped down as to resemble a schematic of tragedy, meaning the complex political sensibility is left as the point, not the backdrop. I don't think the characters are nonexistent. The play has a terrifying mother in Volumnia; she must be one of the bravura roles for older women in Shakespeare. I was reminded of Mrs. Lovett. It has an honorable enemy, which is eventually meaningless; a wife who is loved, but far less than war; a pair of companions, one self-interested, one not, neither able to keep Caius Martius from falling apart—which the audience may in any case want to see. I remember the action came to a point that could have been either catastrophe or comeuppance for its protagonist, and we were not directed by the production to feel it should particularly have been one or the other. I don't think it will ever be my favorite Shakespeare, but it was fascinatingly non-standard. I was glad to have seen it.

Are you planning to see the film with Ralph Fiennes?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I agree that Volumnia is a terrific role. I understand Vanessa Redgrave is brilliant in the film.

And, yes, I want to see it. I think Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's most cinematic texts- which makes it surprising it's not been filmed more often. I particularly regret that no-one thought to record Olivier's performance. One hears extraordinary things about his athleticism and risk taking.

I imagine Brecht would have wanted to beef up the tribunes a bit- and make them more sympathetic. I find the skimping of their parts and the characterization of the citizens as feeble-minded sheep a little lazy. It's not that I want Shakespeare to have written a left-wing play, but I could wish he hadn't fallen back on such tired stereotyping.