Coriolanus

13. Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
first performed: 1608
format: 384-page Signet Classic, 1966, revised 1988, newly revised 2002
acquired: November read: Feb 20 – Mar 28 time reading: 11:58, 2.4 mpp
rating: 3
genre/style: Classic Drama theme Shakespeare
locations: Early Roman Republic
about the author: April 23, 1564 – April 23, 1616

Editors
[[Reuben Brower]] – 1966, 1988, 2002
[[Sylvan Barnet]] – series editor
Source
[[Sir Thomas North]]’s 1579 translation of [[Plutarch]]’s Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus, from [The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans] (c. 120)
Criticism
[[A. C. Bradley]] - Coriolanus : British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, 1912 (printed in [A Miscellany], 1929)
[[Wyndham Lewis]] – from [The Lion and the Fox], 1955
[[D. A. Traversi]] – from [An Approach to Shakespeare], 1938
[[Joyce Van Dyke]] - Making a Scene: Language and Gesture in Coriolanus – from Shakespeare Survey 30, 1977
[[Bruce R. Smith]] - Sexual Politics in Coriolanus, 1988
[[S.Schoenbaum]] – Coriolanus on Stage and Screen, 2002

A few quotes from the Signet Classic edition:

- A. C. Bradley (1912): “perhaps no reader ever called it his favorite play.”

- D. A. Traversi (1938): “Coriolanus has rarely satisfied the critics. Most of them have found it frigid and have even suggested that Shakespeare’s interest flagged in the writing of it”

- Wyndam Lewis (1955): “But Coriolanus, as a figure, is of course the super-snob. Of all Shakespeare’s heroes he is the coldest, and the one that Shakespeare himself seems to have felt most coldly towards.”

- Joyce Van Dyke (1988): “Coriolanus does not have much of a sense of play.”

This was our latest Shakespeare in my Listy group read through is his plays. We're getting to the end, his less popular plays. And the feeling was pretty universal on this one; no one liked it. I found myself rushing through the script to try to finish. But it's not actually a bad play, or one where Shakespeare "flagged". These same Signet-cited critics spend some time breaking down how it's a very carefully written, carefully thought-out script.

The source of this play is 2nd century writer biographer Plutarch. Plutarch's Caius Marcus Coriolanus was a great mythical warrior of the early Roman Republic that was so coarse in personality that no one could stand him in person. He upset his own city so much that he was banished. And he planned his revenge by leading a foreign army to Rome's walls, on the brink of ransacking the city. Rome is saved by his mom, who makes a personal appeal to Coriolanus for mercy, and the unbendable warrior bends, becoming traitor to his own army.

In Shakespeare's hands his story becomes a dry ironic comedy. Coriolanus is a boy warrior, the warrior who never grew up, never learned to feel and empathize, so self-absorbed that he never realized there was anyone else around who was human other than mom. It is, in a way, a psychological study, filled with careful character observation. It's as sophisticated, in this sense, as some of his best plays. It just doesn't seem to really work as a drama. The warriors and their haughty praise of each other are tiring, a bunch of men fawning over stiff imagined narrow greatness. Even the playful homosexual elements can't lighten this one up.

Recommend to resilient completists who really want to check this one off.

2022
https://www.librarything.com/topic/337810#7804273 ( )

A rare misfire, for me, when it comes to the work of William Shakespeare. Coriolanus seems primed for great tragic drama: a victorious Roman general ventures into the murky business of politics, where his blunt military manner and his arrogant pride don't do him any favours when it comes to forming alliances with senators, tribunes or the Roman plebs. So wounded is he by this rejection that he instead forms an alliance with Rome's enemy, the Volsces, and as a turncoat leads their bannermen to the gates of Rome. There is meat here for those who want to ponder the role of soldiers in a civic society, the benefits and drawbacks of political manoeuvring versus principled bluntness, or how a historical figure can be variously painted as a hero on the battlefield and a tyrant in the polls. "So our virtues Lie in th'interpretation of the time," Coriolanus' rival Tullus Aufidius says at the end of Act Four (pg. 275).

The problem was that it was hard to source any of this in the reading of Coriolanus; this is one of those unfortunate plays that can only really be appreciated if you're willing to delve into the scholarly analysis. In this, I was further hampered by the impenetrable introduction to my Arden edition of the play, but the play itself lacks the dynamism to really engage the reader. Coriolanus lacks the political intrigue of Julius Caesar and, with the titular general the only compelling character, we don't see his downfall delivered with the same dramatic blows that we do with the similar tragedy in Macbeth. Coriolanus himself remains at arm's length to the reader, with no soliloquy or signature scene to serve as insight into the character. There are whispers of dramatic potency – like Coriolanus' inevitable retort about the fluttering Volscians in Act Five, which condemns him (pg. 308) – but for the most part the play is a well-serviced mechanism, with nothing in its circular, patiently-turning gears to really excite the reader. ( )

Coriolanus, the last of the so-called political tragedies by William Shakespeare, written about 1608 and published in the First Folio of 1623 seemingly from the playbook, which had preserved some features of the authorial manuscript. The five-act play, based on the life of Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, a legendary Roman hero of the late 6th and early 5th centuries bce, is essentially an expansion of the Plutarchan biography in Parallel Lives. Though it is Elizabethan in structure, it is markedly Classical in tone.

The action of the play follows Caius Marcius (afterward Caius Marcius Coriolanus) through several phases of his career. He is shown as an arrogant young nobleman in peacetime, as a bloodstained and valiant warrior against the city of Corioli, as a modest victor, and as a reluctant candidate for consul. When he refuses to flatter the Roman citizens, for whom he feels contempt, or to show them his wounds to win their vote, they turn on him and banish him. Bitterly he joins forces with his enemy Aufidius, a Volscian, against Rome. Leading the enemy to the edge of the city, Coriolanus is ultimately persuaded by his mother, Volumnia—who brings with her Coriolanus’s wife, Virgilia, and his son—to make peace with Rome, and in the end he is killed at the instigation of his Volscian ally.

Coriolanus is in many ways unusual for Shakespearean drama: it has a single narrative line, its images are compact and striking, and its most effective moments are characterized by understatement or silence. When the banished Coriolanus returns at the head of the opposing army, he says little to Menenius, the trusted family friend and politician, or to Volumnia, both of whom have come to plead for Rome. His mother’s argument is long and sustained, and for more than 50 lines he listens, until his resolution is broken from within. Then, as a stage direction in the original edition testifies, he “holds her by the hand, silent.” In his own words, he has “obey[ed] instinct” and betrayed his dependence; he cannot “stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin.” Thus is his desire for revenge defeated. While his mother is hailed as “patroness, the life of Rome,” Coriolanus stands accused of treachery by Aufidius and is cut down by Aufidius’s supporters. ( )

[2021-11-19]

Who knew Coriolanus was so funny and weird and great? I mean, I know it's a tragedy. But the funny parts really got me. Volumnia rocks. Major plot twist with Aufidius had us screaming as we read aloud. Must get my hands on the new Pelican edition with the corn cover art. ( )