Coriolanus Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares, Heloise Senechal

  Coriolanus

  Textual editing: Eleanor Lowe and Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and Shakespeare's Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Eleanor Lowe and Heloise Senechal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Jan Sewell (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)

  The Director's Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

  Gregory Doran and David Farr

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,

  Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Universite de Geneve, Switzerland

  Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  "Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of Coriolanus and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836881-2

  www.modernlibrary.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: (c) Stephen Mulcahey/

  Arcangel Images

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Language of Poetry and the Language of Power

  Plutarch, Valor, and Virtue

  From Mob to Mother: The Critics Debate

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  Coriolanus

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Coriolanus in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Coriolanus: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director's Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and David Farr

  Shakespeare's Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King's Man

  Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology

  The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY AND THE LANGUAGE OF POWER

  The nineteenth-century critic William Hazlitt said that anyone who was familiar with Coriolanus could save themselves the trouble of reading Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution and Tom Paine's defense of it, because Shakespeare gives you both sides of the question. The play anatomizes the strengths and the weaknesses of both absolutism and republicanism, interrogates both the principle of aristocracy and that of democracy. The plebeians and their elected representatives, the tribunes, have arguments as good as those of the patricians who, at the beginning of the play, have been hoarding grain for no good reason.

  But ultimately, Hazlitt contended, Shakespeare had a leaning toward the side of arbitrary power, that of Coriolanus himself. Perhaps in contempt of his own lowly origins, or out of politic fear of the consequences of "confusion" in the state, Shakespeare gives charisma to aristocratic swagger. Stage directions such as "Citizens slink away" and "Enter a rabble of plebeians" suggest where authorial sympathies do not lie. "The language of poetry," Hazlitt said, "naturally falls in with the language of power." All the memorable poetry belongs to Coriolanus, none to the tribunes. Whatever the force of the arguments on either side, the audience is swept away by the energy of the play's warrior hero. In particular, there is something irresistible about his solitary intensity. "Alone I did it," he vaunts, remembering the deed that gave him his name: the conquest of Corioles, achieved when the plebeian soldiers ran away and the gates of the enemy city clanged shut behind him. In its way, his arrogance is as magnificent as his courage. Accused of being an enemy to the people, he is banished from the city for which he has been prepared to lay down his life on the battlefield. His reply turns the sentence on its head:

  You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate

  As reek o'th'rotten fens: whose loves I prize

  As the dead carcasses of unburied men

  That do corrupt my air: I banish you,

  And here remain with your uncertainty.

  The brilliance of the writing is in the detail: not only the glorious turn in the verb from passive "banished" to active "I banish you," but also the first person pronoun "my" applied to the very "air," thus showing how Coriolanus' world revolves around himself, and the riposte "here [may you] remain with your uncertainty," which reveals the gulf between the solitary martial hero's firmness of vision and the messy vicissitudes of communal life.

  Coriolanus walks proudly away from Rome, soon to face the humiliation of being ordered around by mere servingmen. The very qualities that made him a great warrior--his singleness of purpose and lack of compromise--are those that make him a poor politician. The play is a tragedy because the man of war cannot keep the peace. It is also a work of deep irony. Coriolanus is the walking embodiment of masculinity. He feels a peculiarly intense bond with Aufidius, his opponent on the battlefield. The single erotic speech in the play is spoken by Aufidius when he welcomes the exiled Coriolanus to his home, an arrival that excites him more than his wife crossing his threshold on their wedding night. His nightly dream has been to wrestle with Coriolanus' body in hand-to-hand combat:

  We have been down together in my sleep,

  Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat,

  And waked half dead with nothing....

  Though Coriolanus does not respond to this extraordinary advance in verbal kind, he is manifestly a man who is at his most fulfilled when among other men. And yet the march of this supremely manly man comes to an abrupt halt in the face of his mother, Volumnia. "The ladies have prevailed": by a lovely irony, Rome is saved by the words of an old woman, not the deeds of a young man. No wonder

  Caius Martius is so angry when Aufidius calls him "boy": Coriolanus is Peter Pan in full body armor, a boy who refuses to grow up.

  PLUTARCH, VALOR, AND VIRTUE

  Where did Shakespeare learn the Roman history that he so memorably dramatized in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus? Minor variants and improvisations apart, the answer is simple. While most of his plays involved him in the cutting and pasting of a whole range of literary an
d theatrical sources, in the Roman tragedies he kept his eye focused on the pages of a single great book.

  That book was Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Plutarch was a Greek, born in Boeotia in the first century AD. His book included forty-six biographies of the great figures of ancient history, arranged in pairs, half Greek and half Roman, with a brief "comparison" between each pair. The purpose of the "parallel" was to ask such questions as "who was the greater general, the Greek Alexander or the Roman Julius Caesar?" Shakespeare affectionately mocks the device of parallelism in Henry V, when Fluellen argues that Harry of Monmouth is like Alexander of Macedon because their respective birthplaces begin with an "M" and there's a river in each and "there is salmons in both." But the comedy here is at Fluellen's expense, not Plutarch's--and, like all Shakespeare's richest jokes, it has a serious point. As Alexander the Great killed his bosom-friend Cleitus in a drunken brawl, so King Harry in all sobriety caused his old chum Falstaff to die of a broken heart.

  For Shakespeare, the historical parallel was a device of great power. The censorship of the stage exercised by court officialdom meant that it was exceedingly risky to dramatize contemporary affairs, so the best way of writing political drama was to take subjects from the past and leave it to the audience to see the parallel in the present. The uncertainty over the succession to the Virgin Queen meant that there were frequent whispers of conspiracy in the final years of Elizabeth's reign. It would hardly have been appropriate to write a play about a group of highly placed courtiers (the Earl of Essex and his circle, say) plotting to overthrow the monarchy. But a play about a group of highly placed Roman patricians (Brutus, Cassius, and company) plotting to assassinate Julius Caesar had the capacity to raise some awkward questions by means of the implicit parallel.

  Plutarch's greatest importance for Shakespeare was his way of writing history through biography. He taught the playwright that the little human touch often says more than the large impersonal historical force. Plutarch explained his method in the Life of Alexander: "My intent is not to write histories, but only lives. For the noblest deeds do not always show men's virtues and vices; but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men's natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than the famous battles won wherein are slain ten thousand men, or the great armies, or cities won by siege or assault." So too in Shakespeare's Roman plays. It is the particular occasion--the single word, the moment of tenderness or jest--that humanizes the superpower politicians: Brutus and Cassius making up after their quarrel, the defeated Cleopatra remembering it is her birthday, Caius Martius exhausted from battle forgetting the name of the man who helped him in Corioles.

  In his "Life of Caius Martius" Plutarch gives a brief character-sketch of the Roman general who, by virtue of his heroic endeavor behind the closed gates of Corioles, gained the surname Coriolanus: "For this Martius' natural wit and great heart did marvelously stir up his courage to do and attempt noble acts. But on the other side, for lack of education he was so choleric and impatient that he would yield to no living creature, which made him churlish, uncivil, and altogether unfit for any man's conversation." As the name Martius suggests, Coriolanus has all the martial virtues. His tragedy is that he has none of the civil ones. He devotes himself wholly to the code of valor (Latin virtus). Where Mark Antony is led astray from Roman values by his lover Cleopatra, Coriolanus is trained up in virtus by his mother, Volumnia. He has a suitably austere Roman wife, who usually appears in company with a chaste companion (Valeria, the very opposite of Cleopatra's companion Charmian). And when his son, Young Martius, a chip off the old block, is praised for tearing the wings off a butterfly with his teeth, we gain a glimpse into the kind of upbringing that Coriolanus may be imagined to have had. "Anger's my meat," says Volumnia: perhaps in compensation for the premature disappearance of her husband, she has bred up an angry young man, ready to serve Rome on the battlefield where one senses she wishes she could go herself--as she does at the end of the play.

  If Antony and Cleopatra is about the tragic consequences of the dissolution of Romanness, Coriolanus is about the equally tragic result of an unyielding adherence to it. "It is held," says Cominius,

  That valour is the chiefest virtue, and

  Most dignifies the haver: if it be,

  The man I speak of cannot in the world

  Be singly counterpoised....

  "If it be": Coriolanus' own mode of speaking, by contrast, is what he calls the "absolute shall." To leave room for an "if" would be to call his whole world-picture into question.

  The play brings the absolute embodiment of virtus into hostile dialogue with other voices. As in Julius Caesar, the action begins not with the hero but with the people, to whom Plutarch (a believer in the theory that history is shaped by the deeds of great men alone) never gives a voice. In the very early period of the Roman republic, around the fifth century before Christ, Rome faced two threats: an external danger from neighboring territories (the Volscians, based in Antium and Corioles) and the internal danger of division between the patricians and the plebeians. The martial hero is supremely successful in dealing with the external threat through force, but his attempt to handle internal affairs in the same way leads to his banishment and eventual death. The opening scene reveals that the people do have a case: the First Citizen argues cogently against inequality, speaking "in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge." Diplomacy is the skill needed here; Coriolanus, who is always "himself alone" and who trusts in the deeds of the sword rather than the blandishments of the word, will have no truck with compromise. His pride and his desire to stand alone are only allayed when he faces his mother, wife, and son pleading for him to have mercy on the city. Volumnia appeals to the bond of family; after her eloquent entreaty, Coriolanus hovers for a moment in one of the most powerful silences in Shakespeare. He sets aside his code of manly strength, accepts the familial tie, and in so doing effectively signs his own death warrant. He has for the first time fully recognized the claims of other people, escaped the bond of absolute self. The knowledge of what he has done brings a kind of peace: "But let it come," he says of his inevitable end. He is speaking here in the voice of Stoic resignation.

  FROM MOB TO MOTHER: THE CRITICS DEBATE

  Shakespeare is traditionally praised for his disinterestedness, his ability to see both sides of a question, to enter into every character and give equal weight to every viewpoint, equal sympathy to every human dilemma. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, delivering a public lecture in the politically polarized wake of the French republican revolution and the subsequent restoration of monarchical values, said that Coriolanus "illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakspere's politics." Coleridge knew that it would have been difficult for Shakespeare--with the king in his audience--to write with "philosophic impartiality" about the politics of his own time, so he turned instead to classical Rome: "The instruction of ancient history would seem more dispassionate." But then Coleridge told his audience that the play begins with "Shakspere's good-natured laugh at mobs."1 For Coleridge, a sometime radical whose politics had lurched to the right by the time he delivered his lectures on Shakespeare, and for his predominantly genteel, middle-class audience, during an era of political uncertainty and unrest (the Regency period), "mobs" in the streets of London or Paris were something to be feared. It was comforting to imagine Shakespeare laughing at them, but remaining "good-natured" as he did so. But Coleridge's emphasis on the comedy--the joke about the "big toe" and so forth--meant that he didn't take the argument of the people entirely seriously. By not doing so, he was implying that Shakespeare did not, after all, give equal weight to the patrician and the plebeian sides of the question.

  Hazlitt's essay on the play, with which this introduction began, must be seen in the context of Coleridge's move. Hazlitt, a committed radical democrat, did not regard the play's opening debate as a laughing matter. He recognized that food riots--whether in ancient Rome, in Shakespeare's time or his
own--were a serious political matter, a matter of life and death. But he also recognized that the stage presence and verbal charisma of Coriolanus upset the political equilibrium:

  There is nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that they are like to be so: but when a single man comes forward to brave their cries and to make them submit to the last indignities, from mere pride and self-will, our admiration of his prowess is immediately converted into contempt for their pusillanimity. The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of necessity.2

  Hazlitt the political liberal finds himself at odds with Hazlitt the reader and writer who admires forceful poetic language more than anything else. Coriolanus troubled him with the thought that "the aristocracy of letters"--the best of literature and drama--might at some profound level be incompatible with political ideals of democracy and liberty. All men and women should be equal in the body politic but there is no equality within the body of great writing: Shakespeare stands like a king above his peers.

  The influential late nineteenth-century critic Georg Brandes developed Hazlitt's ideas further. Perhaps literary greatness is inherently on the side of the "aristocratic" principle or at the very least of a form of individualism and inwardness that is at odds with "mass" feeling:

  Shakespeare's aversion to the mob was based upon his contempt for their discrimination, but it had its deepest roots in the purely physical repugnance of his artist nerves to their plebeian atmosphere. To him the Tribunes of the People were but political agitators of the lowest type, mere personifications of the envy of the masses, and representatives of their stupidity and their brute force of numbers. Ignoring every incident which shed favourable light upon the plebeians, he seized upon every instance of popular folly which could be found in Plutarch's account of a later revolt, in order to incorporate it in his scornful delineation.3

  Brandes's attention to the political implications of Shakespeare's subtle alterations of his source was further developed in twentieth-century criticism: "In Plutarch's version, the original revolt is occasioned by the Senate's support of the city's usurers, and the issue of the scarcity of grain does not come up until after Coriolanus's battles with the Volsces. Shakespeare pushes the issue of usury into the background ... and brings the issue of grain to the fore."4 Many critics have suggested that this emphasis was in part a response to the grain riots in the English Midlands--Shakespeare's home territory--in 1607.