On Coriolanus

I've never seen any of Shakespeare's "Roman" plays in live performance. I've just read through Coriolanus (Penguin edition) for the first time that I remember - I haven't even seen this play on the screen, although I know of at least two film versions, the Ralph Fiennes one being the most recent, and of course the BBC version from the eighties.

So I came to the play with few preconceptions, and I have found it most troubling. I have read some of the introductory material in the Penguin edition and other bits and pieces since reading it, and while it has shed some light on the play for me, I still find Coriolanus a most difficult character to get my head around.

It makes sense to me that this is one of Shakespeare's later plays, as the set-up seems a lot briefer than some of his other works. In fact the whole play seems "short-cutted", the action and the story run hell-for-leather, with very little exposition of a back-story, or time allowed for the audience to take in what's going on. I felt while reading it that I was running down a slope with the danger of falling and tumbling through the story: I'd just got my head into a space of understanding and the plot had moved on, almost before I was ready. It's a play that's almost written in shorthand. Given the pace and structure of the play, I wonder how much of Coriolanus' story was known to the general theatre-goer of the day. I know that his story comes from Plutarch, and so perhaps many of the lawyers and so forth that came to see plays in the playhouses would have been familiar with the general outline.

Whatever the case, Shakespeare's real interest in this story is not the narrative, but the character of Coriolanus and, almost as much, the character of the "mob" and their representatives, the Tribunes. Again via my limited background reading, a lot of what Shakespeare put in here may have been comment on what was for him current events happening in England, and much scholarship has no doubt been done to draw those links. This can be useful to know,  but I'm not sure it's the reason for the extraordinary way Shakespeare takes aim both at patricians, the mob, and politicians.

This is a play where no-one come out well. Coriolanus in some ways seems almost a cardboard-cutout of a character, a warrior sure of his patrician status, with no time for the lower classes. Effective in combat, where to be uncompromising is an advantage, but totally useless in public life, where he finds it impossible to restrain and contain his feelings of revulsion for the ins and outs of dealing with the public: he seems not only unlikeable, but in fact foolish. Yet the public for which he shows such disdain seem to earn his disdain, with Shakespeare portraying them as easily led, fickle, thoughtless and stupid. Their representatives, the Tribunes, are shown as devious, disloyal and self-serving.

The ultimate question that I struggle to answer to my satisfaction about this play is why does Coriolanus do what he does? Why does he run for Consul? One could say that his mother and friends convince him to do so, but he has been set up in the battle scenes as someone who knows his own mind and makes his own decisions, so that explanation doesn't wash. Why, when he is exiled, does he go straight to his mortal enemy Aufidius and join forces with him? He had enough support from patrician Rome to enable him to take his revenge without resorting to that. Why, after rejecting every request for mercy, does he finally succumb to the requests of his mother? When he didn't listen to her when she pleaded with him to be more politic with the masses when running for Consul?

There are many riddles in this play: in many ways Coriolanus is as unknowable as Hamlet. The question may be does he know himself? Certainly in the field of battle he is in a place he knows and controls, but does he know the depth of his soul - if he knows he can't do what is required to be elected Consul, why does he continue, especially knowing what could come of blowing up in front of the plebs in the way he did. While many of Shakespeare's plot devices are transparent ways to further the narrative of his plays, those in Coriolanus seem in some ways to be the most forced. It can be hard for the reader to see why Croriolanus would do what he does. Of course, as I stated earlier, I haven't seen the production live or on screen, so perhaps some of these "problems" are solved within the acting.

For me, the best speeches come from Coriolanus, and the best of those are his scathing denunciations of the common man. Shakespeare, when writing, was a chameleon, able to step into the shoes of a King as easily as those of a tramp, a woman as well as a man, a lover as much as a soldier, but these speeches of Coriolanus have a vituperative power that leads the reader to think they may in fact project a feeling of the author himself. This is dangerous territory and I counsel against it, but who can not be impressed by lines such as the first he speaks in the play -

"...What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,
That rubbing the poor itch of your opinion
Make yourself scabs?
...
Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;
Where foxes, geese. You are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice
Or hailstone in the sun.
...
He that depends
Upon your favours swims with fins of lead
And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye!"

These are lines written by one who has a sure touch in describing feelings that no doubt still were felt by the aristocracy in the early Seventeenth Century.

We still are no closer to the motivation of Coriolanus however. Is it indeed to win praise from Volumnia his mother, who is certainly portrayed as hard-headed and ambitious for her son, and no less scathing of the Commons than he. She at least has some ability to change her outward activity to fit the mood, and her pleading for Rome is the ultimate abnegation of her nobility, kneeling before her own son. And yet surely she would suspect that Coriolanus' mercy would presage his downfall? Another mystery.

The one thing we can take from the play is that the vices of both Coriolanus, the mob and the Tribunes end up doing none of them any good. If there is a "moral" from this tragedy, it is as much that the mob and politicians need to be more thoughtful about their government as it is that those who desire power should have some humility to go with their talent.

Paul Prescott, in his introduction to the 2005 Penguin edition of the play that I have been reading, writes "At the end of Coriolanus it is unclear whether Martius' death has served any great political or metaphysical purpose." It is certainly that.

Certainly not one of the Bard's greatest plays, but as with nearly all the others a work that one can grapple with for a lifetime.