Coriolanus

Abstract

Coriolanus is a play that does not yield its riches easily. It is more overtly political and impersonal than most of Shakespeare’s work; it has a hero who is difficult to sympathize with and who is almost completely inarticulate when it comes to his own inner life; it maintains throughout a harshly ironic tone unrelieved by comedy or extravagant characterization; and it deploys a consistently cool, anti-lyrical style of verse that is brilliantly suited to the situation but unlikely to win immediate or universal admiration. It is, however, a play that rewards prolonged exposure or careful scrutiny. Politically, its analysis is sufficiently subtle and ambiguous to have been espoused by both Left and Right: the people and their tribunes have been seen as proto-democrats in search of a measure of political equality or, on the other hand, as a rowdy, stinking mob led by opportunists and bent on tearing up the social fabric. The play caused riots in Paris during the 1930s, where Left and Right clashed in the theatre and in the streets outside, and where the curtain had to be rung down some fifteen or twenty times during the first performance. Bertolt Brecht produced his own leftist version of it, and Günter Grass, the contemporary German novelist, has written an ironic play entitled The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising which has Brecht rehearsing his actors for his production of Coriolanus while a real revolution is going on outside in the streets.