Shakespearing 32.1 by John King

More thoughts on Coriolanus

I confess: I don’t get Coriolanus. Not on a gut level, anyway.

Perhaps one has to be a soldier to see into the hero’s spirit properly. A soldier before the modern epoch. Certainly before Ulysses S. Grant.

The idea that one’s identity can be granted stature and honor through killing on the field of battle seems like an atavistic ideal, when a soldier’s survival seemed less random, before bombs and IEDs and the fog of war would make survival seem miraculous, and reason to rejoice, and mourn, considering all of one’s comrades who did not survive.

Coriolanus has a hawkish worldview and was protective of empire, just like Dick Cheney, except that unlike Cheney, Coriolanus fought firsthand for his ideals rather than let other people risk their lives for his desire for desolation and violence.

And yet.

If valor is the chief virtue, then Coriolanus would have been named consul. Not dictator, like Caesar, but consul. But he didn’t love the common people.

The common people of an empire that he risked his life and honor for on the battlefield. The common people he has tacitly fought for. The common people who would rebel against the empire in times of peace, and let empire protect them in times of war. They are “dissentious rogues.” They are “curs that like not peace nor war.”

One has to wonder—as the mind (my mind anyway) drifts from the story, since I don’t quite care about Coriolanus, or his worthy adversary Aufidius—whom Shakespeare felt empathy for in this play. Both the citizens and Coriolanus seem to have too much pride, even if Coriolanus seems to have more legitimate cause for pride. As David Foley said last week, “Coriolanus is [Shakespeare’s] most problematic avatar of nobility yet.”

I don’t care, usually, about Macbeth either. In Othello and Hamlet and Twelfth Night, I care about all of the characters. In Macbeth I sort of like the porter. The rest are annoying, and it is a fine cast indeed that can entertain me. Coriolanus is much the same way.

Except that Coriolanus has a drinker in it: the Roman patrician Menenius.

Menenius is in the thick of Roman political life, but paradoxically strives to be above the hypocrisy of the capital by quipping his honest way like a classic Shakespearean clown, without the costume. When he encounters two tribunes of the people and anticipates their resistance to Coriolanus’s consulship, he becomes combative:

BRUTUS

Come, sir, come, we know you well enough.

MENENIUS

You know neither me, yourselves nor any thing.

He soon takes his leave by telling them, “more of your conversation would infect my brain.” Politics is folly.

Menenius’s abhorrence of cynical and hypocritical politics, his inability to serve officially and hold his tongue, puts him in the same category as Benjamin Franklin in this country.

Politics, for Menenius, is tragic folly. He cannot keep Coriolanus, having joined with Aufidius, from ravaging Rome. Menenius’s sense of identity, as a Roman, is annihilated by this.

The emotional gymnastics that bring about Coriolanus’s climactic change of heart are inexplicable to me.

If only the play had been called Menenius.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Shakespearing #32 by David Foley

Coriolanus

Coriolanus is an anxious play. I’m not scholarly enough to know how closely it reflects the anxieties of its times, but it certainly reflects the anxieties of ours. First of all there are the people. What to do about the people, those “woollen vassals”? All very well to get sentimental about them when they’re marching with Henry V through France, but what happens when they turn into a mob “whose rage doth rend”? What happens when the native good sense of the people shows up at a town hall and starts screaming about death panels? Or Shariah law? Or birth certificates?

Like a lot of things in Shakespeare, his attitude towards the people is marked by an unresolvable tension. On the one hand, he’s got a commoner’s appreciation for their canny wit and a humanist’s sympathy for their burdens. At the same time, the people are fickle, easily swayed, subject, as a group, to such irrational shifts of loyalty and opinion that their movements become as senseless as a natural force. (The rest of the above quote says, “Whose rage doth rend/Like interrupted waters.”) Their persuadability without sense makes them, in Coriolanus, a pliable force for ruthless, boneheaded politicians. (It’s the combination of ruthlessness and boneheadedness that makes Sicinius and Brutus feel so contemporary.)

But matching Shakespeare’s queasiness about the people is his queasiness about nobility. Coriolanus is his most problematic avatar of nobility yet. This scarred and indomitable warrior has all the qualities of the noble soul—including a conception of honor, world, and self so abstractly elevated that he is unable to imagine his way into an understanding that doesn’t reflect his own. It’s no accident that his most passionate relationship is with his enemy, Aufidius, who, when Coriolanus shows up at his house, cries, “Let me twine my arms about that body.” (You can have some queer fun with Coriolanus, a man’s man whose second most intense relationship is with his mother and who’s always ready to “clip” another warrior in his arms.)

From a dramatic perspective, Coriolanus allows Shakespeare to do what Shakespeare does best: create drama out of the clash of immovable entities. Coriolanus gets off to a slow start—you have to work your way through some not very interesting battles that mostly set up Coriolanus’s terrifyingly inflexible nature (“Boils and plagues/Plaster you o’er,” he yells at his recalcitrant soldiers.)—but once the play gets going, Shakespeare gets a lot of dramatic and even comic juice out of Coriolanus’s inability to react to any circumstance except by the laws of his own monolithic nature.

Wherein the anxiety. Not only are there no good choices here—the people, the politicians, the nobility are all alike incapable of governing themselves much less the state—but they’re incapable of finding some common understanding by which they might proceed together. And, if they can’t do it, the barbarians, the Aufidiuses, will have the run of the place. I’m trying to think if there’s another Shakespearean tragedy that ends without some sense of a restored order, a new regime to seam together the divided state. Rome has been saved from destruction, but no one on hand seems capable of pulling the nation together. We don’t even return to Rome. The last scene takes place in Corioli, the Volscian city from whose defeat Coriolanus earned his name. After they murder Coriolanus, the Volscians bear him off, now a “noble memory” and, for them, a trophy of a civilization that was supposed to work but didn’t.

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David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.