Antony and Cleopatra

Act Two, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Two:  At Pompey’s camp, the news that Caesar has assembled an army is not exactly well-received. Antony has returned.  Meanwhile, Rome’s three rulers (the triumvirate) are locked in disagreement: Antony is criticized for Fulvia’s rebellion but denies undermining Caesar. Agrippa suggests that in order to strengthen their alliance and be reconciled, Antony should marry Octavius Caesar’s sister, Octavia. Both agree, but it isn’t long before Antony wants to return to Egypt and Cleopatra. News of Antony’s marriage has reached Cleopatra, however, and she is devastated. And even though the threat of civil war is averted when Pompey agrees to halt his campaign, it becomes all too clear that the “peace dinner” that his intentions are far darker than anyone realizes.

Let’s take a brief look at one of my favorite scenes:  the one in which Cleopatra discovers that Antony has betrayed her by marring Octavia.  It is, clear, a glorious set piece for Cleopatra and the actor who plays her: after receiving one of the play’s many many messengers (“twenty-several” of hers alone follow Antony to Rome), she is so frantic for news that she will not even allow him to speak. Responding to his guarantee that her beloved is “well,” she barks:

Cleopatra:

    But, sirrah, mark; we use

To say the dead are well. Bring it to that,

The gold I give thee will I melt and pour

Down thy ill-uttering throat.

Messenger:

Good madam, hear me.

Cleopatra:

     Well go to, I will.

But there’s no goodness in thy face. If Antony

Be free and healthful, so tart a favour

To trumpet such good tidings! If not well,

Thou shouldst come like a Fury crowned with snakes,

Not like a formal man.

Messenger:

Will’t please you to hear me?

Cleopatra:

I have a mind to strike thee ere thou speak’st.

(2.5.30-42)

Although the scene grows even more broadly comic – particularly when she “hales him up and down” in a rage, as the stage directions have it – it is also tinged by a growing pathos. As we watch Cleopatra fight her urge to hear Octavia’s beauty described to her (albeit by a messenger who is far too terrified to tell her anything she doesn’t want to hear), it seems clear that she feels the loss of what she so touching called her “salad days” all too keenly.

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From Garber:

“In the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra one Caesar has succeeded another, one Pompey another Pompey.  [MY NOTE:  Keep in mind Jan Kott’s “Grand Mechanism”]  This Rome is a place of time and history, of realpolitik, business, and war. ‘He was disposed in mirth,’ says Cleopatra of Antony, ‘but on the sudden/A Roman thought hath struck him.’ (1.2.72-73). A ‘Roman thought’ is a serious thought, as well as a thought of Rome. This Rome is governed by a man who embodies all of its virtues and all of its shortcomings. Octavius Caesar, a man who has in the play no personal life, no vices; who does not like to drink wine because it brings out the irrational and emotional side of men. ‘Our graver business/Frowns at this levity,’ he observes censoriously in the great and comic drinking scene (2.7.15-116). The Caesar of this play has no visible wife. His loving attentions are centered on that apparently most pure and Roman of affections, the love of a sister, Octavia. Later Octavia will become Antony’s wife, in a transaction that has all the romance of a merger between two large corporations, which is essentially what it is. The proxy marriage – not uncommon for royalty in Shakespeare’s time – is sealed by a handshake between Antony and Caesar. Octavia is not present, nor is she consulted. And Antony is all business, all policy, when in Rome: ‘[T]hough I make this marriage for my peace,/I’th’ East my pleasure lies.’ (2.3.37-38).

But if Caesar is tender to his sister, he is ruthless in politics and war. He will arrange, for example, to have those soldiers who have deserted from Antony’s forces fight in the front lines of the Roman army, ‘[t]hat Antony may seem to spend his fury/Upon himself’ (4.6.89-10). And at the end of the play he cold-bloodedly tries to deceive Cleopatra into surrendering, because he wants the political benefit of bringing her in triumph back to Rome. Caesar is the spirit of Rome in this play: puritanical, efficient, bloodless. And Octavia, his sister and near-namesake, is the spirit of Roman womanhood. ‘Octavia is of a holy, cold, and still conversation,’ says Enobarbus (2.6.120). ‘Conversation’ in this context means disposition, mode or course of life – what a wife for Antony! (It also means ‘sex,’ which is even more apropos.) ‘He married but his occasion here,’ but [h]e will to his Egyptian dish again.’ His ‘occasion’: the marriage is a business opportunity. Enobarbus knows his master, even if his master does not know himself.

The play deliberately contrasts Octavia with Antony’s former wife, the heroic Fulvia, an alternative model for the Roman matron, who leads an army into battle (‘Fulvia thy wife came first into the field’ [1.2.78]) and whose death makes this new marriage possible, even though Antony is still enchanted with Cleopatra. Octavia’s mildness and obedience, as we will see, are no match for Cleopatra, nor, indeed, fro Antony. She exemplifies the virtue of compromise, but she (like Cressida, and like Blanche of Castile in King John) finds that no middle way is possible:

     Husband win, win brother

Prays and destroy the prayer; no midway

‘Twist these extremes at all.

3.4.18-20

On the one hand, then, is Rome, and the ‘holy, cold, and still’ Octavia. And on the other, the antithesis of these, the burgeoning land of Egypt and its queen, who is everything Octavia is not. Egypt is a place of enormous, teeming fertility, the contrary of the relatively staid and sexless Octavius and Octavia. Its chief geographical emblem is the fertile Nile:

     The higher Nilus swells

The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman

Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,

And shortly comes to harvest.

2.7.19-22

Like the river, the Queen teems with life:

She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed.

He ploughed her, and she cropped.

2.2.233-234

The joke is sexual and biblical: Caesar’s sword is made into a ploughshare. The ‘great Caesar,’ of course, is not Octavius but Julius. Cleopatra is the mother of Cesarion, by Julius Caesar. She is ‘the serpent of old Nile,’ at once wily temptress and genius loci, an Egyptian spirit of place. Repeatedly, Egypt is imaged and established as a place of excess, of boundlessness in desire and will, a place in which night replaces morning, so that, as Enobarbus – that detached and excellent witness – says, ‘we did sleep day out of countenance, and made the night light with drinking’ (2.2.184-185). Egypt is also a place of music, that transforming art of romance, that in this play, as so often in Shakespeare, breeds melancholy: ‘music, moody food/Of us that trade in love’ (2.5.1-2). In fact, Cleopatra, casting about for recreation when Antony is away, demonstrates at once the nature of Egyptian life and its changeability. First she calls for billiards and shouts, ‘Let’s to billiards,’ then, ‘We’ll to th’ river. There,/My music playing far off’ (2.5.3, 10-11). At the river she will fish, or as she says, ‘I will betray/Tawny-finned fishes’ (11-12), for the betrayal is as much a part of the sport as the angling. These are the entertainments of Egypt: sex, food, appetite, music, drinking, betrayal – and performance. Performances in which Cleopatra and Antony change places and costumes, male and female: ‘[I] put my tires and mantles on him whilst/I wore his sword Philippan’ (2.5.22-23); ‘tires and mantles’ are headdresses and scarves.  The sword, with or without Freud, is the sign of male adult prowess, as was clear as well in the image of Caesar ‘ploughing’ Cleopatra with his sword (though we should remember here also the example of the Roman warrior wife Fluvia).

The gender games of Egypt are among Cleopatra’s favorites, but so is that game of betrayal. She is willful, contrary, and in every sense provocative. Thus she delights in sending false messages to see how they are received:

    If you find him sad,

Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report

That I am sudden sick. Quick, and return.

1.3.3-5

As is so often the case in Shakespearean dramatic construction, this apparently negligible foible will come back, later in the play, with far more serious and tragic consequences. For when Cleopatra sends the message that she is dead, she provokes Antony’s suicide. But at the beginning of the play her charm is evident, and its politically disastrous effects are not yet brought to the fore. She captivates many in the audience as she captivates Antony. Her own nature is one of antithesis, paradox, opposites, and opposition. (For years I deployed a Shakespeare litmus test in my Harvard lecture course, polling the students as to whether they thought of themselves as Romans or Egyptians. Not surprisingly, the ‘Roman’ years coincided with relatively conservative upswings in U.S. politics, while the ‘Egyptian’ years were, by and large, liberal.)

Of all the activities typical of Shakespeare’s Egypt, though, one of the most striking in the early part of the play is that of fortune-telling. The Soothsayer is an Egyptian. In Caesar’s Rome no such fantasy is tolerated; in Rome the future is told by armies and policy, by Machiavellian manipulation and deception, and by artful shows of strength. In Egypt, by contrast, the future is just another entertainment, another game – a game in the form of a riddle that, like the riddle of the Sphinx, can be misinterpreted. ‘You shall outlive the lady whom you serve,’ says the Soothsayer to Charmian and Iras, Cleopatra’s ladies (1.2.27). And Charmian says, ‘O, excellent! I love long life better than figs’ (28). Figs are often associated with fecundity and fertility, and sometimes with lust and sex. In ‘Of Isis and Osiris’ Plutarch writes: ‘The fig leaf is interpreted as drinking and motion and is supposed to represent the male sexual organ’ – and which, of course, it often covers in statuary. Again, Charmian’s casual comment prefigures a more ominous moment late in the play, when the Clown, or rustic, comes to Cleopatra with a poisonous serpent in a basket of figs. The two elements, long life and sexuality, are part of the burgeoning texture of Egypt. But Charmian is wrong to interpret the Soothsayer’s message as a harbinger of long life. She will outlive her lady by a few moments only, and her lady, Cleopatra, will die an untimely death.

The Soothsayer will also speak to Antony when both of them come to the hostile climate of Rome. Again his warning is serious, and again it is disregarded:

Antony:

     Say to me

Whose fortunes shall rise higher: Caesar’s or mine?

Soothsayer:

Caesar’s. Therefore, O Antony, stay not by his side.

Thy daemon, that thy spirit which keeps thee, is

Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,

Where Caesar’s is not. But her him thy angel

Becomes afeard, as being o’erpowered. Therefore

Make space enough between you.

2.3.14-21

Like all quasi-magical or prophetic figures in these plays – the witches in Macbeth, for example, of the Fool in Lear – the Soothsayer may be understood as existing both as an independent character (he has lines: an actor plays the role); and as an aspect of Antony’s conscience and consciousness, here warning him of dangers he partly comprehends but also resists. ‘Make space enough between you.’ But when Rome comes to Egypt, when the Egypt and Rome in Antony cannot any longer be disentangled, there is no space. “’[T]hough I make this marriage for my peace,/I’th’ East my pleasure lies.’)

All the attributes of Egypt are also attributes of its queen: fertility, excess, playing, omens, sex, and appetite. Consider some of the names Cleopatra is given, and gives herself, in the course of the play. She is a ‘witch,’ says Antony when he is betrayed by her, but she is also an ‘enchanting queen.’ She is Thetis, the mother of that greatest warrior of all, Achilles; she brought him his armor, as Cleopatra buckles Antony into his. She is his ‘great fairy,’ a Fairy Queen, powerful and dangerous; she is Isis, the Egyptian goddess of the moon, and earth, and the Nile, and sexual generation, a goddess who appears in mythology always surrounded by snakes. She is Antony’s ‘grave charm,’ and ‘thou spell’ – both functions of language, as well as of beauty and sexuality – one who bewitches by magic.

The play is full of magic that seems to have Cleopatra as its source, magic that overpowers Antony in Roman eyes, robbing him of his reputation and his name, that most powerful and primitive of all magical properties. ‘[H]is name,/That magical word of war,’ Ventidius calls it (3.1.30-31). But increasingly Antony comes to doubt the rightness of names. ‘I am/Antony yet,’ he will assert defensively, and ‘what’s her name/Since she was Cleopatra (3.13.92-03, 98-99), in a passage behind which we can hear Troilus’s cry of despairing unbelief; ‘This is and is not Cressid.’ In many parts of the world in the early modern period, as in some places still today, to know someone’s real name was to have some measure of control over him or her. Thus the pattern of the losing and finding of names (‘This is I,/Hamlet the Dane’ [Hamlet 5.1.241-242); ‘My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son’ [Lear 5.3.164]) often accompanies moments of extreme danger, heroism, and self realization in Shakespeare’s plays. In this play, Antony’s quest is to find out what ‘Antony’ means to Rome, to history, and by implication to the generations that will come long after him, including the Shakespearean audience, then and now. Antony is Antony, but the name of Cleopatra, as we have seen, is many names. ‘[W]rinkled deep in time,’ she is somehow both ageless and timeless, apparently as beautiful now as when she was ‘[a] morsel for a monarch’ – and that monarch was Julius Caesar, the uncle and adoptive father of Octavius.

Of all the descriptions of Cleopatra in the play, none is so powerful or so justly famous as Enobarbus’s compelling picture of her first meeting with Antony ‘upon the river of Cydnus.’ In Shakespeare’s source, Plutarch’s ‘Life of Antony,’ there is no direct model for the confidant figure Enobarbus, who fits into the Shakespearean mode of Horatio and Banquo. In Plutarch, we find one Domitius surnamed Aenobarbus, or ‘red-beard,’ who accompanied Antony on military campaigns, and another Domitius (without a surname) who deserted him. Shakespeare conflates these two figures and names his character Enobarbus. Of greater importance for the evolution of this dramatic character is the fact that Shakespeare gives to him a speech – the ‘Cyndus’ speech – that in the ‘Life of Antony’ is the words of Plutarch himself. Instead of the omniscient voice of the historian-chronicler, there is the highly critical voice of the loyal soldier skeptical about Cleopatra, skeptical about her power over his master, and finally entrapped in the tragedy that overtakes them all. And yet Enobarbus is, albeit unwillingly, dazzled by the spectacle, and by the woman, even as he disapproves of her effect upon Antony. This astonishing passage presents Cleopatra as a paradox of nature and a work of art. It describes an event from the past, a scene that took place, therefore, ‘offstage,’ and its lyric potential can be compared to that of the ‘[s]unshine and rain at once’ passage in King Lear.  This, too, is an ‘unscene,’ unseen by the spectators in the theater except in the mind’s eye. By contrast, the Cleopatra we see onstage is deliberately ‘human’ – often comic, domestic, playful, sometimes petty and cruel 9as she is, for example, with the unfortunate messenger who brings her the news of Antony’s marriage). That Cleopatra is flawed, and can be shown to us. But the Cleopatra of legend, the Cleopatra who has ensnared king after king, generation after generation, is a creature of poetry and myth rather than of drama, and so we are offered Enobarbus’s admiring and ruefully accepting vision. (Modern readers may have encountered this speech first in its satiric rewriting in The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot.) What is so striking about Enobarbus’s speech, though, is its complete lack of irony, despite the speaker’s resistance:

Enobarbus:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggared all description. She did lie

In her pavilion – cloth of gold, of tissue –

O’er picturing that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature. On each side her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid did.

Agrippa:

O, rare for Antony!

Enobarbus:

Her gentlewoman, like the Nereides,

So many mermaids, tended her i’th’ eyes,

And made their bends adornings. At the helm

A seeming mermaid steers. The silken tackle

Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands

That yarely frame the office. From the barge

A strange invisible perfume hits the sense

Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast

Her people out upon her, and Antony,

Enthroned i’th’ market-place, did sit alone,

Whistling to th’air, which but for vacancy

Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

And made a gap in nature.

(2.2.197-224)

[MY NOTE:  As a means of comparison, here’s the same passage from Plutarch:

Though she received many letters of summons both from Antony himself and from his friends, she so despised and laughed the man to scorn as to sail up the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple, its rowers urging it on with silver oars to the sound of the flute blended with pipes and lutes. 2 She herself reclined beneath a canopy spangled with gold, adorned like Venus in a painting, while boys like Loves in paintings stood on either side and fanned her. Likewise also the fairest of her serving-maidens, attired like Nereïds and Graces, were stationed, some at the rudder-sweeps, and others at the reefing-ropes. Wondrous odours from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks. 3 Of the inhabitants, some accompanied her on either bank of the river from its very mouth, while others went down from the city to behold the sight. The throng in the market-place gradually streamed away, until at last Antony himself, seated on his •tribunal, was left alone. And a rumour spread on every hand that Venus was come to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia.

Antony sent, therefore, and invited her to supper; but she thought it meet that he should rather come to her. 4 At once, then, wishing to display his complacency and friendly feelings, Antony obeyed and went. He found there a preparation that beggared description, but was most amazed at the multitude of lights. For, as we are told, so many of these were let down and displayed on all sides at once, and they were arranged and ordered with so many inclinations and adjustments to each other in the form of rectangles and circles, that few sights were so beautiful or so worthy to be seen as this.]

Cleopatra here is described in her element – or rather, in all her elements: fire, air, earth, and water. As we have noted, Antony’s element is that of what the play calls ‘dungy earth’ – so that when he decides later to fight Caesar on the sea rather than on the land he is ingloriously defeated, and the land is ‘ashamed to bear [him]’ (3.11.2). Above all, Enobarbus’s glittering description is of a natural work of art. Winds lovesick for the purple sails; silver oars whose strokes on the water are sexual, and desired; the fans of the boys, like the bellows mentioned in the opening scene, seeming to heat and cool at once (‘what they undid did’). Cleopatra herself is a Venus surrounded by Cupids. Even the air, we are told, wishes to violate its cardinal rule, the rule that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ so that it, too, may go ‘to gaze on Cleopatra,’ herself the ultimate exception to all rules. And yet this object of this consummate art is, in the next breath, described by the same Enobarbus in terms of her shortcomings. In fact, her shortcomings are part of the paradox that makes her irresistible:

Enobarbus:

I saw her once

And having lost her breath, she spoke and panted

That she did make defect perfection,

And, breathless, pour breath forth.

Maecenas:

Now Antony

Must leave her utterly.

Enobarbus:

     Never. He will not.

Age cannot with her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety. Other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies. For vilest things

Become themselves in her, that the holy priests

Bless her when she is riggish.

2.2.234-245

She makes hungry where she most satisfies. Cleopatra is more than a woman, she is sexual appetite itself, she is beauty and charm. Even the priests regard her carnal desire as holy. And at the same time, Cleopatra is human weakness, pettiness, and frailty, ‘hopping’ in undignified steps through the public street, panting with loss of breath. Her humanity, like her pettiness and her changeability; somehow increases rather than decreases her astonishing erotic power. She is paradox and contradiction, the incarnation of desire – fire, water, and air, dazzling a man of earth.

Enobarbus praises her as ‘[o]’er-picturing…Venue,’ and it is worth underscoring this evocation of Venus, since it is central to the iconography of Cleopatra throughout the play. (To ‘overpicture’ is to represent in excess of reality; in Enobarbus’s eyes Cleopatra is even more magnificent than the Roman goddess of love and beauty.) The story of Venus and Mars, the love goddess and the war god, is everywhere in Antony and Cleopatra, as, indeed, it was in Othello. From the opening moments of the play the audience has heard Antony compared to Mars. Philo – a soldier whose name means ‘love’ in Greek – laments the fact that Antony’s ‘goodly eyes,/That o’er the files and musters of the war/Have glowed like plated Mars’ (that is, Mars in armor) (1.1.2-4) are solely bent on Cleopatra. Enobarbus himself makes the comparison; ‘If Caesar move him’ (i.e., provokes him), he says,

Let Antony look over Caesar’s head

And speak as loud as Mars…

2.2.4-6

The story of Mars and Venus, the story of a war god enslaved by a love goddess, was a popular subject for Renaissance painters. Images of Venus or Cupid toying with the discarded armor of Mars, while the god of war sleeps, sated with sexual pleasure, are common in the period. When Antony calls Cleopatra ‘the armourer of my heart,’ and has her buckle on his armor for the ill-fated fight with Caesar, in which she will betray him, an early modern audience might well think of this famous scenario of unmanning by love. More specifically, Shakespeare’s audiences might also call to mind Helen’s unbuckling of Hector in Troilus and Cressida: one nonpareil woman buckles, the other unbuckles, but both disarm the heroes they tend.

Associations with Mars and Venue would also ‘explain’ another of the characteristic play activities of the Egyptian world, the exchange of gender roles and adornments. In a way, this is characteristic Egyptian inversion – night for day, love for war, timelessness for time, immorality for morality – but it is also a behavior in the world of love that is at odds with the usual conventions of war and politics. Thus Caesar’s contemptuous account of Antony’s life in Egypt includes a glance at what a Roman thinks is ‘unmanliness’:

    [H]e fishes, drinks, and wastes

The lamps of night in revel: is not more manlike

Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy

More womanly than he…

1.4.4-7

On the other hand, Cleopatra herself, as we have seen, tenderly remembers such scenes of cross-dressed costume and play:

Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed,

Then put my tires and mantles on him whilst

I wore his sword Philippan.

2.5.21-23

The rough soldier Enobarbus is alarmed by this tendency on Antony’s part, this power of Egypt to make the hero effeminate, subjugated to a woman. At the beginning of the play he cautions the ladies in waiting, ‘Hush, here comes Antony,’ and Charmian corrects him: ‘Not he, the Queen’ (1.2.68).

It is a telling theatrical moment: from the first, in the formal procession of state, the woman displaces the man. Enobarbus protests against Antony’s decision to fight by sea and not by land: he is rightly dubious about Cleopatra’s decision to attend the battle, and, indeed, to ‘appear there like a man’ (as it was said, after the fact, that Queen Elizabeth had done at Tilbury at the time of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, costumed like ‘an androgynous martial maiden’). Enobarbus complains to Cleopatra that rumor says ‘an eunuch, and your maids/Manage this war,’ and in fact Antony is increasingly to be found in conversation with Mardian, Cleopatra’s attendant eunuch. At one point Mardian speaks wistfully of his own desire, for in Egypt, even a eunuch has longings. ‘Indeed?’ says Cleopatra, always alert to erotic possibilities. And Mardian answers,

Not in deed, madam, for I can do nothing

But what indeed is honest to be done.

Yet I have fierce affections, and think

What Venue did with Mars.

1.5.15-18

He hardly has far to look, since Venue and Mars are constantly before him. But Antony is, as we have seen, a Mars whose powers of war are sapped by his enslavement in love, by his ceding of armor, command, and judgment to Cleopatra-Venus. It is to Mardian, late in the play, that Antony will lament angrily,

O thy vile lady,

She has robbed me of my sword!

4.15.22-23

From such a hero, a line like this, spoken to a eunuch, can hardly fail to carry the obvious sexual implication. Cleopatra has ‘unmanned’ Antony, as Venus unmanned Mars.”

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And to end this post, from Jan Kott:

“Shakespeare’s world is historical not only because he remains more or less true to facts and dates. History in Antony and Cleopatra is present not only as material for the plot. The names of generals and geographical terms are taken from Plutarch. But Plutarch’s world, compared to Shakespeare’s, is flat. Heroes and history exist in Plutarch side by side. In Shakespeare history itself is the drama. Caesar had destroyed Pompey; Brutus had assassinated Caesar; Antony had crushed Brutus. Three men have divided the world among themselves: Antony, Octavius – who has assumed the name of Caesar – and Lepidus Against them has risen Sextus Pompey, son of the great Pompey. Antony, through his legates, orders Pompey to be murdered. The younger Caesar has imprisoned Lepidus and ordered him to be murdered. Only two remain:

Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more;

And throw between them all the food thou hast,

They’ll grind the one the other.

(III.5)

This is Shakespeare. The world is varied and multifarious, but the world is small. Too small for three rulers. Too small even for two. Either Antony, or Caesar, must die. Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy about the smallness of the world. this is something not found in Plutarch. Plutarch’s world is not tragic. Generals and rulers are good or bad, wise or stupid, prudent or mad. Antony was mad, and he lost. The younger Caesar was prudent, and triumphed. History happens to be cruel, because tyrants happen to be cruel. But the world is arranged rationally; in the end virtue and reason win. The world is a great place, after all.

In Antony and Cleopatra the world is little. It seems much smaller than in Plutarch. It is narrow and everything seems to be nearer. The Messenger says:

Thy biddings have been done, and every hour,

Most noble Caesar, shalt thou have report

How ‘tis abroad.

(I, 4)

This sentence, too, is absent in Plutarch. Not only did Shakespeare read Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in North’s contemporary version. He viewed the world through the experience of late Renaissance. In Antony and Cleopatra the sun still circles the earth, but the earth has already become a tiny globule, lost and of no importance in the universe.

His face was as the heavn’ns, and therein stuck

A man and moon, which kept their course and lighted

The little O, the earth.

(V.2)

The world is small, because one cannot escape it. The world is small because it can be won. The world is small, because to master it, chance, or a helping hand, or a skillful blow will do. Three men have divided the world among themselves. Another man, who wanted to resist them, has already humbled himself. He throws a feast and invites the triumvirs to his galley. They drink. Lepidus gets drunk first. He falls to the ground on deck. A servant throws him over his shoulder and carries the ‘pillar of the world’ out. The officers look at their generals:

Enobarbus:  ‘A bears the third part of the world,…

Menas:  The third part, then, is drunk.

This is the first confrontation. But on board the same galley another confrontation takes place, even more cruel and violent. The triumvirs are drunk, and Pompey is recalled from the feast by one of his followers. The man suggests that sales be put up, and the throats of the three rulers of the world cut.

It is one of the greatest scenes in Antony and Cleopatra, another scene not found in Plutarch, but taken straight from experiences of the Renaissance; a scene strikingly modern. Pompey refuses.  But how he does it. By reproaching Menas for not having done it himself; for asking his approval before and not after the deed:

     Ay, this thou shouldst have done,

And not have spoke on’t! In me ‘tis villainy;

In thee ‘t had been good service.

(II, 7)

….

Shakespeare’s characters are – with the possible exception of Hamlet – a puzzle and a surprise to themselves. His protagonists are torn apart by passion…the world is always there and constantly exerts its pressure, from the opening to the final scene. They too exercise a choice, but it is a choice through action. The theme of Antony and Cleopatra could be taken from Racine: dignity and love cannot be reconciled with the struggle for power which forms the matter of history. But neither the world nor the struggle for power is show in the abstract. The heroes are restless, like big animals in a cage. The cage gets smaller and smaller, and they writhe more and more violently.”

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So…are you enjoying the play so far?  And let’s go back to Garber’s question:  do you think of yourself as Roman or Egyptian?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87M1uReVDq4&list=PL264D181331DEA07E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5fliD6qoz0&list=PL264D181331DEA07E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ_xoXWhW5o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78wS0IVZK-Y

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning — more on Act Two

Enjoy your weekend.

Antony and Cleopatra

Act Three, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Three:  Rome’s campaign against the Parthians has been a success, but the calm is shattered when Antony, on the way to Athens with his new wife, criticizes Caesar’s renewed hostilities against Pompey. Octavia is sent to Rome to mediate, but it is soon reported that Antony has returned to Egypt without Octavia’s knowledge, and that he has promised the eastern empire to Cleopatra. Caesar, fresh from his trouncing of Pompey, intends to fight. And Antony, accompanied by his lover, is beginning to show dangerous lapses of judgment: spurning the advice of their military advisors, the two prepare for an ill-fated and ill-advised sea assault.  As predicted, they lose badly. Caesar rejects their peace terms, which would allow Antony to retire into private life with Cleopatra, and he attempts to turn them each other.

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From Garber:

“But the story of Mars and Venus is only one of the mythological tales and stories suggested by this play, which itself ultimately aspires to the condition of myth. To many in the Renaissance audience the story of Antony’s heroism, his capacity to do the impossible, as Caesar so enviously catalogues it – to live on berries and tree bark, to drink from noxious puddles, to do wonders on the field of battle – would have called to mind the exploits of that premier hero Hercules – half man, half god, the son of Jove And Antony is repeatedly associated with Hercules throughout the play Cleopatra mockingly calls him a ‘Herculean Roman’ when she teases him about his love for Fulvia. He traces his descent from Alcides, another name for Hercules. One of his loyal soldiers swears by Hercules as Antony rejects his advice to fly by land. And in a mood of self-dramatization Antony complains that Cleopatra is a shirt of Nessus to him. (The shirt of Nessus was given to Hercules’ bride by a centaur who desired her. In all innocence she presented the shirt to Hercules, expecting that it would increase his love for her and inflame his passion, but instead it poisoned him and caused his death.) Most poignantly, the play’s spectators become witnesses to a scene (4.3) in which the spirit of Hercules – Antony’s tutelary spirit – departs. Much as in the opening moment of Hamlet, the scene is set at night, and there are confused soldiers on watch and a rumor of some apparition. A noise of ‘hautboys’ (oboes, from the French words for ‘high’ and ‘wood’) is heard under the stage, and one soldier observes,

‘Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,

Now leave him.

(4.3.13-14)

Hercules was sometimes imagined as a buffoon as well as a hero, because at one point in his ‘labors’ he became enslaved to Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and was forced to dress like a woman and do women’s work. Here the analogy is clear:  both heroes made captive to powerful Eastern queens, emasculated in the public view. Equally pertinent was the famous ‘choice of Hercules’ between Pleasure and Virtue, understood by Renaissance readers as a lesson in self-determination. Ben Jonson’s masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) would later bring together the two classical criteria for poetry, that it delight and instruct, but Hercules’ choice was to be for the one or the other, and he, unlike his descendant Antony, chose Virtue. For Antony the choice is between Octavia, the ‘piece of virtue,’ and Cleopatra, where ‘[i’]th’ East my pleasure lies.’ Finally for him there is no question. Between Rome and Egypt, between the Roman and the Egyptian is himself, he chooses, or acknowledges, Egypt, and the world of desire, imagination, and art.

A Jacobean audience for this play would have been mindful both of James I’s complicated relations with powerful and seductive regal women – his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots; his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth – and also of the strongly held views among many political and religious thinkers of the time that women should not rule over men. (The audience would also have been reminded that it was really with men that James exercised his Egyptian side.)

The presence of women on the thrones of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had raised concerns among those who thought it was contrary to nature, to God’s law, and to political expediency. Scottish religious reformer John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women insisted that scripture and classical history proved that women could not and should not rule. (‘I affirm the empire of a woman to be a thing repugnant to nature,’ he wrote, citing the view expressed in Aristotle’s Politics and in other ancient sources that ‘wheresoever women bear dominion, there the people must needs be disordered…and finally, in the end, they must needs come to confusion and ruin.’) In particular, men governed by women reversed the proper order of nature. Tertullian, Augustine, Paul, Jerome, and others are all cited to emphasize the abomination of husbands being ruled by wives. Lest his readers think he is speaking only of married women, Know insists, with Saint Ambrose, that ‘from [every] woman, be she married or unmarried, is all authority taken to execute any office that appertains to man.’

How does the play invite us to view Antony’s choice? Are his soldiers right when they gossip about him at the beginning of the play – is this ‘dotage,’ the infatuation for an old soldier for a bewitching siren? What is the nature of the claim he makes when he tells Cleopatra that one tear equals all that is eon and lost, when he assures her that one kiss repays him for her treachery, when – as John Dryden would put it when he rewrote and retitled the play in 1678 – Antony trades ‘all for love’? Folly, or heroism? The crux of the play is embodied in this paradox, the essential paradox of Cleopatra’s nature.

As we have seen, the play deliberately charts a pattern based upon the four elements of classical and Renaissance lore: earth, water, air, and fire. It moves inexorably away from ‘dungy earth’ toward the quicksilver elements of magic and change:

     By the fire

That quickens Nilus’ slime, I go from hence

Thy soldier-servant, making peace or war

As thou affects.

(I.3.68-71)

This is Antony’s pledge to Cleopatra as he leaves for Rome, in the early moments of the play. Later, on the battlefield, he wishes he could include all four elements in his warfare against Caesar:

Their preparation is today by sea;

We please them not by land.

…………………………

I would they’d fight i’th’fire or i’th’ air;

We’d fight there too…

(4.ii.1-2, 3-4)

But the key to Antony’s nature and his struggle is clearly the vision of Cleopatra on the river Cydnus, the woman whom everything becomes, whom air, and water, and fire alike adorn; a woman of contradiction and paradox whom the mortal Antony is constantly seeking to know and to posses. This Cleopatra, who is Antony’s Venus, is also his muse, a condition of language as well as of nature and art. This ‘mutual pair’ is also in a way an emblem of metaphor, in the way that they come to define each other. As Cleopatra will say, ‘[S]ince my lord/Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.’ (3.13.188-189). When in the comic drinking scene Lepidus asks Antony, ‘What manner o’ thing is your crocodile? (2.7.38), Antony’s riddling reply describes not only the symbolic animal of Egypt but the ineffable quality of his love:

It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

(2.7.39-42)

The Shakespeare who could write knowingly about ‘the mournful crocodile’ in Henry VI, Part 2, is fully aware of the capacity of this changeable being to seduce and delude.

One of the unusual things about this play is the way in which its amorous stakes are mirrored in the oddness of its structure, its sprawling dramatic shape. It is not usual to find notations in these plays like ‘act 3, scene 12’ or ‘act 4, scene 14.’ The act and scene divisions are in the main the contributions of eighteenth-century-editors, rather than of Shakespeare or his company, but they are indicative, nonetheless, of change s in location and of the number of times the stage is cleared. The play as a whole is stretched, elongated, until it approximates in size and grandeur the epic and mythic events it contains – events, as we have seen, that span the globe from Rome to Egypt, and encompass the four elements. This is a more demonstrably epic structure than we have encountered before in Shakespeare, and the epic scope is matched by an ‘epic’ content, since among the literary and mythic forebears of Antony and Cleopatra themselves we should also count Aeneas and Dido, the key figures in what was, for Shakespeare’s England, the most celebrated epic of them all, Virgil’s Aeneid.

Aeneas is the legendary hero, the soldier, the man chosen by the gods to found Rome as the successor state to Troy – a Rome that would become the home of ‘universal peace,’ the Pax Romana, under his descendant Augustus (Shakespeare’s Octavius Caesar). Rome would become, in British lore, the cradle of another great empire and epic civilization, that of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Aeneas was also, famously, the lover of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and thus another powerful Eastern queen, like Cleopatra (and the Lydian Omphale, who enslaved Hercules). Aeneas’s love affair with dido was stage-managed by his mother, Venus, as a way of providing him safety and succor. Cupid, replacing Aeneas’s son Ascanius, won his way into Dido’s heart and inflamed her with passion for the Trojan refugee Aeneas.

At a key point in Antony and Cleopatra Antony, speaking fondly of a time when he and Cleopatra will wander hand in hand through Elysium, boasts that ‘Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,/And all the haunt be ours.’ (4.15.53-54). Spirits from the underworld will follow them, and desert those earlier, legendary lovers. But Dido and ‘her’ Aeneas may not be together in Elysium, since Aeneas deserted her, and deserted passionate love, to go on to Rome to marry Lavinia and to take up his responsibilities as the founder of the new city. Dido committed suicide on a burning funeral pyre. ‘Hic amor, haec patria,’ Aeneas declares, in Virgil’s poem: there is my love, there is my country – in Rome. The marriage to Lavinia is a political marriage of convenience, similar to Antony’s marriage to Octavia. But for Antony, from the beginning, ‘Here is my space’ – here in Egypt. And the marriage to Octavia is abandoned in favor of Egypt and art, and timelessness, and a legendary love with Cleopatra. So Shakespeare’s play presents both epic and anti-epic content, at times deliberately turning away from history and politics toward poetry, romance, fantasy, and desire.

The baseline of historical time, however, is clearly established by Octavius. ‘The time of universal peace is near,’ he declares, ‘…the three-nooked world/Shall bear the olive freely’ (4.6.5-6). This Caesar is the ‘Caesar August’ of the Christian gospels, and the time of Augustus was also the time when Christ was born in Bethlehem. The play moves toward this anticipation of what Christian England would have regarded as universal order in history, in time. [MY NOTE:  I suspect Bloom does not quite see this Christian aspect to the play.]  But these considerations of order, government, and peace are subjugated in the course of the play to the evolution of the two larger-than-life mythic heroes in its title. The play’s odd and unusual shape, then, is not only effective but also significant. It is a structural counterpart of the issues and figures it presents, and particular moments, like the raising of Antony to Cleopatra’s monument in act 4, have about them a decidedly baroque sensibility, producing a stage picture reminiscent of the glorious twisted figures in Baroque crucifixion and deposition in iconography; it is also erotic and sensual. In the monument scene Cleopatra again bears Antony’s weight, as he has gloried in doing from the play’s earliest moments.

In fact, the use of the stage is effectively made to mirror this split in the play’s historical and mythic designs, placing the baroque and eroticized narrative Antony and Cleopatra against the regularized Renaissance grid of order and symmetry that the play associates with Octavius Caesar, Consider, for example, the use of the double entrance, the two doors located on either side of the rear stage. In Antony and Cleopatra these two doors are used to display the two forces in tension with each other, so that we find stage directions like ‘Enter Pompey at one door, with drum and trumpet; at another, Caesar, Lepidus, and Antony’ Or ‘Enter Agrippa at one door, Enobarbus at another.’ Caesar’s man at one door, Antony’s man at the other. The two doors not only show opposition, they also suggest balance. The battle scenes, too, switch from Caesar’s camp to Antony’s from one part of the plain to another, and scenes in Rome are intercut with scenes in Egypt. A rhythm of thesis and antithesis is developed, with no synthesis in sight.

Under the leadership of Octavius Caesar, the Roman political world seeks to resist fragmentation, and to impose order: from three parts of the world, to two, to one. In the opening scene Philo had spoken of Antony as the ‘triple pillar of the world,’ one of the triumvirs, sharing equal power with Lepidus and Octavius. By the time of act 2, scene 7, the wonderful drinking scene, Lepidus is carried off the stage by a servant, as Enobarbus quips, ‘There’s a strong fellow…A bears the third part of the world.’ (2.7.83-85). But a triple division is unmanageable, disorderly: ‘[t]hese three world sharers, these competitors,’ Menas calls the triumvirs. (the unmanageable three-part division of the world seems to haunt Shakespeare’s political plays. It appears signally in 1 Henry IV and again in King Lear.) And so the third part of the world, Lepidus, is done away with, ‘the poor third is up, till death enlarge his confine.’ (3.5.10-11). At this point, as Enobarbus points out with customary skepticism,

     [W]orld, thou hast a pair of chops, no more,

And throw between them all the food thou hast,

They’ll grind the one the other…

(3.5.12-14)

Octavius and Antony are like a pair of jaws (‘chops’), devouring the world between them, and wearing each other down as well.

The play thus narrows to its central split, its central conflict: two doors, two nations, two forces, two philosophies, two generals. Once again the impulses of the rivals are exactly contrary. It is reported to Caesar that Antony has staged a public scene in Egypt, during the course of which, ‘enthroned’ in the marketplace, he gave away portions of his kingdom: Egypt, lower Syria, Cyprus to Cleopatra, other lands to his sons Alexander and Ptolemy. Antony’s impulse here, and always, is generosity. We will later see him send, in this same spirit, a box of treasure after the deserting Enobarbus. So Antony gives, Antony disperses, in a gesture as fertile in its own way as the nature of Cleopatra and the overflowing Nile. By contrast, Octavius engrosses up, collects, unifies, and consolidates (as James I would do, and as Prince Hal had done, and Lear, fatally, had not.) He wants to make of a dispersed and divided kingdom a single empire with a single ruler: himself. At the end of the play, in his moving lament on the death of Antony, he makes this impulse toward ruthless unity clear once again: ‘O, Antony,/…We could not stall together/In the whole world’ (5.1.35, 39-40). The world was not large enough to contain them both. This is the view of realpolitik, and thus the literally correct political view in terms of contemporary statecraft. Pragmatically, Rome is better off under Caesar than under Antony. The taxes will be collected; the chariots will run on time.

But at some cost. Efficiency and order – from three parts of the world to two; from two, one – displace passion and generosity. The system displaces the individual. Lepidus tries to reconcile the two forces, Antony and Caesar, and is ridicule by both sides as a flatterer:

Agrippa:  ‘Tis a noble Lepidus.

Enobarbus:  A very fine one. O, how he loves Caesar!

Agrippa:  Nay, but how dearly he adores Mark Antony!

……………………………..

Enobarbus:  Spake you of Caesar? How, the nonpareil?

Agrippa:  O Antony, O thou Arabian bird!

(3.2.6-8, 11-12)

The whole exchange is drenched in irony, and Lepidus is killed, ground between those two remorseless chops. Octavia in her turn attempts compromise, trying to reconcile her husband her brother, and she, like so many Shakespearean women before her confronted with this impossible choice, is defeated by it.

Octavius Caesar’s political ambition is relentless. Octavius gathers, and Antony disperses. The last half of the play is a continual series of desertions from Antony’s camp, as his loyal soldiers reluctantly leave him, one by one, culminating in the agonizing desertion by Enobarbus. As we have already noted, Enobarbus serves for Antony as Horatio did for Hamlet, Banquo for Macbeth, and Kent for Lear. All are confidants and advisors, ‘sane’ men rather than madmen, rational realists rather than tragic heroes. Enobarbus deserts from Antony’s camp, and in doing so he breaks his own heart. He cannot live in the cold cynicism of Octavius’s world.

In one sense, then, there is a real and absolute conflict of philosophies between Rome and Egypt, Octavius and Antony. Their enmity is necessary and unavoidable, and is mirrored in the conflict between the concept of a Renaissance or early modern history play, the play of Rome, and the baroque play of Egypt, which incorporates elements of tragedy, comedy, and romance. And yet it is not sufficient to say that Octavius Caesar is a faceless politician, that the conflict is one of ideology and statecraft, politics and policy. To look at Caesar this way is to disregard a set of highly personal feelings and attitudes that are crucial to the play’s design. The competition between Caesar and Antony can as readily be seen in generational terms as in ideological ones – as a battle between youth and age, the old order challenged by the new. This generational debate is one of the most familiar, and most dramatically powerful, in Shakespeare, whether it takes place in the English history plays, in Romeo and Juliet, in Troilus and Cressida, or in political tragedies like King Lear and Macbeth. The most passionate rivalry in Antony and Cleopatra has its seat in the feelings of Octavius Caesar.

It is important to bear in mind that this is Octavius Caesar, not Julius. The play explicitly posits an older generation of heroes, titans, or giants of the past, from which Octavius is excluded, and of which Antony is the last living representative. Antony is a hero in a world that has grown too efficient to contain and comprehend heroes, a world that has become merely political. Octavius’s tone, as he speaks early in the play about Antony’s heroic feats as a soldier, and especially his acts of personal deprivation and endurance, is a tone of wonder and disbelief. It is a tone familiar to modern audiences that look back upon the sacrifices and heroism of earlier ears (of pioneers, polar expeditions, the ‘Great Generation’). Antony is a heroic figure who thus closely parallels, in the Shakespearean pantheon of heroes, old-style champions like Hamlet’s father, and Hector, and Hotspur, and Tybalt. As with all these figures, his preferred style of combat is ‘single fight,’ the one-on-one duel to the death. Hector wishes to fight Achilles in single combat, but he is surrounded and ambushed by the Myrmidions: old Hamlet defeated old Fortinbras in single combat before the play Hamlet begins; Hotspur confronts Prince Hal face-to-face. So Antony wishes to meet Octavius, but this is not Caesar’s way. In fact, Enobarbus, who frequently speaks aside to himself – and to the audience – much as Edgar did in King Lear, is aghast to think that Antony imagines such a confrontation is possible. His tone here is, as so often, both heavily ironic and tinged with sadness:

Enobarbus [aside]:

Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will

Unstate his happiness and be staged to th’ show

Against a sworder!…

……………………..

     Caesar, thou hast subdued

His judgment, too.

(3.13.28-30, 35-36)

‘Like enough’ is our modern ‘A likely story!’ Even the idea of such a challenge is wholly inappropriate to the world in which Antony and Cleopatra find themselves. For Cleopatra also insists that single combat is the best way. They are like a pair of splendid dinosaurs, who have outlasted the world for which they were made. They have outlasted Julius Caesar, and old Pompey, Gnaeus Pompey. But is this not, in a way, precisely the point? Antony is not a realist in his demand for a ‘single fight’ against Caesar – but is the world, yet, so securely Caesar’s? Caesar’s own problem is that he is haunted by the past, haunted by a world too great, a canvas too large, for him full to dominate or comprehend it. He is haunted by the myth of the past. And he is surrounded by its living revenants.

Consider what we know about Cleopatra, her age, her beauty, her charm. Fairly early in the play comes the comic scene with the messenger, in which we see Cleopatra relentlessly quizzing him about Octavia and her defects. Once he realizes that she wants to hear only unflattering reports, he is eager to oblige. Octavia is ‘[d]ull of tongue, and dwarfish,’ and she is a widow, not a young virgin. But at this point the messenger goes too far. Seeking to add specificity to this unfavorable account, he volunteers his estimate of her age: ‘And I do think she’s thirty’ (3.3.28). Now, in strict historical terms, the Cleopatra of history was twenty-nine years old at the time of these events. But Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is a woman of the world, a woman of experience – and, in modern terms, a ‘diva.’ Although we hear repeatedly about her past conquests, she never seems to grow any older. She is timeless, but she is not young. As he has done in many other plays when dealing with historical and chronicle material, the playwright artfully alters history to accord with his dramatic purposes. Thus the Cleopatra of this play is ‘wrinkled deep in time’ and a ‘serpent of old Nile.’ ‘Age cannot wither her.’ She talks about ‘[m]y salad days,/When I was green in judgement’ – when she was in love with Julius Caesar. (1.5.72-73). (It is tempting, although unhistorical to think of her as the original ‘Caesar salad.’ Alas, this Caesar was a Mexican restauranteur of the 1920s. Antony, in an angry mood, condemns her (also in culinary terms) for her past:

I found you a morsel cold upon

Dead Caesar’s trencher; nay, you were a fragment

Of Gnaeus Pompey’s, besides what hotter hours

Unregistered in vulgar fame you have

Luxuriously picked out.

(3.13.117-121)

Dead Caesar, and Gnaeus Pompey. These, rather than Octavius, are Antony’s near contemporaries. He is a little younger than they, but older by far than their sons, and he belongs to the remarkable world those heroes inhabited. Not only has Antony challenged Octavius to single combat, but he has also proposed that the combat take place ‘at Pharsalia,/Where Caesar fought with Pompey’ (3.7.31-32). And this Caesar and Pompey are old Caesar, old Pompey; Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. The remembered scene is an epic contest between two world-shakers. But the new Caesar and the new Pompey, Octavius Caesar and Sextus Pompeius, are, by contrast, mere politicians, faint echoes of their fathers’ grandeur. This again is a familiar pattern to observers of modern politics, where great men’s sons often embark upon political careers based upon their famous surnames rather than their innate gifts.

The younger Pompey’s anger at Antony is expressed, significantly, in terms of dynastic rather than martial rivalry: ‘O Antony,/You have my father’s house’ (2.7.122-123). You live where he lived, you have displaced him – and me. In a way, Antony and Cleopatra is, along with Coriolanus, the most Oedipal of Shakespeare’s plays, full of submerged and smouldering love and resentment, expressed toward Antony, the father figure, the reminder and rebuker of sons. The contest is clearly defined. Young Pompey, and most of all young Caesar, feel not only political rivalry but also sexual jealousy against Antony, who possesses the love of the ageless and timeless Cleopatra, the woman who was mistress to each of their fathers. Time has them all in thrall – except for Cleopatra. She herself seems as desirable as ever.”

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And from Bloom:

“Antony and Cleopatra, as a play, is notoriously excessive, and keeping up with it, in a good staging or close reading, is exhilarating but exhausting. Teaching the play, even to the best of classes, is for me a kind of glorious ordeal. Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago all demand an energetic response, but there plays have a few flats, or resting places. Antony and Cleopatra surges on, prodigal of its inventiveness, daemonic in the varied strength of its poetry Critics rightly tend to agree that if you want to find everything that Shakespeare was capable of doing, and in the compass of a single play, here it is. I can think of no other play, by anyone, that approaches the range and zest of Antony and Cleopatra. If the greatest of all Shakespeare’s astonishing gifts was his ability to invent the human, and clearly I think it was then this play, more than Hamlet or King Lear, might be considered his masterwork, except that its kaleidoscopic shifting of perspectives bewilders us. A critical description or a performance of either Cleopatra or Antony seems doomed always to leave out too much, but Shakespeare would have it that way, as if had grown impatient both of players and of audiences. A drama with a remarkable quantity of scene shifts, Antony and Cleopatra seems to have no minor or dispensable episodes or sequences, even when neither Antony nor Cleopatra is on stage. Janet Adelman sensibly argues that this augments the patterns of uncertainty in the play, and she suggests that Shakespeare deliberately makes aspects of both major characters opaque to us. This may be, and yet the converse is equally plausible; since no privileged perspective is granted to the audience, the dramatic ironies proliferate and cannot be controlled by us. The uncertainties multiply because the highly histrionic protagonists themselves rarely know whether they are being themselves or acting themselves. Their characters are in that one sense transparent: they are role players, with all the world for audience. The world is always on their minds: the word world is a refrain throughout Antony and Cleopatra. If you cease to know when you impersonate yourself, then you are likely to seem more opaque than you are.

Falstaff dominates his plays, though scholarly critics crusade to reduce his magnitude. Hamlet encounters less critical resistance in pervading his drama, while Iago can be said to improvise Othello as he goes along. So varied and exuberant is Antony and Cleopatra that its protagonists never dominate; the world prevails, and the play, more than any other by Shakespeare, is itself a heterocosm. Cleopatra and Antony are parts of the world, they desire to be the world, and that alone is their tragedy. Octavius wins because he represents Rome, and Rome will ingest much of the world. Shakespeare neither endorses nor protests the Roman imperialism, when the victorious Octavius proclaims, ‘The time of universal peace is at hand,’ our own perspective will determine the degree of Shakespearean irony we hear. [MY NOTE:  Very unlike Garber!] The new Caesar ends the play with an ambiguous tribute to his dead enemies:

She shall be buried by her Antony.

No grave upon the earth shall clip in it

A pair so famous: high events as these

Strike those that make them: and their story is

No less in pity than his glory which

Brought them to be lamented. Our army shall

In solemn show attend this funeral,

And then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see

High order, in this great solemnity.

(V.ii.356-64)

What exactly is Octavius saying? Essentially he is praising the glory of his own victory, while graciously allowing ‘pity’ for the most famous, he thinks of all couples. One could remark that he had hoped to exhibit at least Cleopatra, if not Antony also, in his triumphal procession upon returning to Rome, and his inability to do so is the actual pity of it, for him. But whether Shakespeare desires the audience to be so little receptive to the roman victor, we cannot know. Even if history permitted it, how could we accommodate a vision of Antony and Cleopatra as Emperor and Empress first of the East, and then of the world? There would be no play, and Shakespeare exults in the opportunities afford him by his two titanic exuberances, each rammed with life, and careless of the costs of their flamboyances. The world’s report, in regard to both is of blemishes, and the audience cannot say that the world is wholly wrong. The great ones of this play – Antony, Octavius, even the younger Pompey – never speak for the world and the audience. It is their subordinates, military and at court, with whom we can identify, as in this dialogue between Antony’s chief man, Enobarbus, and Menas, who serves Pompey:

Menas:         — You and I have known, sir.

Enobarbus:  At sea, I think.

Menas:        We have, sir.

Enobarbus:  You have done well by water.

Menas:        And you by land.

Enobarbus:  I will praise any man that will praise me, though it cannot be denied what I have done by land.

Menas:        Nor what I have done by water.

Enobarbus:  Yes, something you can deny for your own safety: you have been a great theft by sea.

Menas:        And you by land.

Enobarbus: There I deny my land service. But give me your hand, Menas: if our eyes had authority, here they might take two thieves kissing.

(II.vi.83-96)

‘I will praise any man that will praise me’ is, in context, great comedy, and out of it, a dark wisdom. Antony, Octavius, and Pompey cut their deals and divide up their world; the admirals and generals who execute their orders have a wonderful instructive comradeship, voiding their leaders’ grand rhetorics, and happily acknowledging land piracy and sea piracy. Their perspective is the world’s: the quarrel between East and West, Cleopatra-Antony and Octavius, is a vast dispute between pirates on a sublime scale. The center of Antony and Cleopatra is neither the relation between the celebrated lovers, nor their struggle with Octavius, wavering and varied; the circles that serve them mingle perspectives with the audience. The world is the center, personified by everyone in the drama who is not the supreme commander of an empire, or at least a faction (Pompey). Octavia, dealt by her brother to Antony in political marriage, becomes an image of the world, as Antony watches her reluctant farewell to her brother:

Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can

Her heart inform her tongue – the swan’s down feather,

That stands up on the swell at the full of tide,

And neither way inclines.

(III.ii.47-50)

The world, like Octavia, is powerless to choose between full tide and ebb tide: she, and the world, are ‘the swan’s down feather’ that ‘neither way inclines.’ Antony’s metaphor, with its generous detachment, testifies to his endless capacity for empathy, and helps explain the love he evokes in his troops. Yet the metaphor’s implications do not favor him, or Octavius, or Cleopatra. Enobarbus, told that Caesar has eliminated Lepidus and Pompey, again speaks for the audience:

Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more;

And throw between them all the food thou hast,

They’ll grind the one the other.

(III.v.13-15)

‘Chaps’ here are ‘chops,’ jaws, and after devouring all the food the world afford they will seek to swallow one another. Like the world, something in us will not wholly take sides; Shakespeare takes great care to prevent this, for all the vitalism he assigns to Cleopatra and her Antony. When Antony returns from his final, desperate,, and momentary victory against Octavius, Cleopatra greets him with her usual magnificence:

O infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from

The world’s great snare uncaught?

(IV.viii.17-18)

It will be only a step beyond this that Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet sells out to Octavius, provoking the final Herculean rage of Antony What then is ‘the world’s great snare,’ that much catch even the ‘infinite virtue,’ or matchless courage, of the descendent of Hercules? Is it the war, or a Cleopatran plot with Octavius, or simply the mutability of the world, its insatiability as an audience? The world does not choose Octavius, but in this most theatrical of plays we are given theater of the world, and the audience, glutted with Shakespearean richness, must finally be allowed its peace, in the death of its two heroes, before it returns for quite another play, a Coriolanus or a Pericles. If you require the world as audience, and Cleopatra and Antony will accept no less, then at last you must burn out, like Antony, or choose a private theater for your apotheosis, as Cleopatra does. No one has given more to the drama than Shakespeare, and here he is at his most prodigal, but he begins also to sense that the audience is a snare for him and soon will require less, rather than his more. Once Shakespeare loved the world, later in his career, Falstaff’s is a scornful love, one that scoffs the world aside, and bids it pass. The poet of Antony and Cleopatra neither loves nor hates the world; nor the theater; he has begun to weary of them both. The glory of Antony and Cleopatra is neither its ambivalence nor its ambiguities: of all Shakespeare’s dramas, it is the greatest as poem. It plays superbly still, when properly directed and acted, but as a reverberation it is too large for any stage, though still better perceived upon the right stage than in even the most acute study.”

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I think Bloom makes a most persuasive case for the play…

As I mentioned, I’m taking a couple of actual days off, so my next post will be Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning, and then back to our normal schedule.

Enjoy.  And please keep your questions and comments coming!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq7uW01m01A&list=PL264D181331DEA07E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OI9sQZDIss&list=PL264D181331DEA07E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNAzW5pBJq4&list=PL264D181331DEA07E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjbzCcAzSSo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blssN2CoIpY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAQbTnnt8Sg

And finally, a bit off of A&C, but a fascinating look at how Shakespeare’s plays would have sounded…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s#t=12

Antony and Cleopatra

Act Four, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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From Tony Tanner:

“As well as being a history play, Antony and Cleopatra contains within it the traces of the outlines of a morality play – for by the early Renaissance the ‘moral’ of the story of the illustrious lovers was well established. We can find it in Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Book V, Canto VII:

Nought under heaven so strongly doth allure

The sense of man, and all his minde possesse,

As beauties lovely baite, that doth procure,

Great warriours oft their rigour to represse,

And mighty hands forget their manlinesse…

So also did the great Oetean Knight

For his loves sake his Lions skin undight:

and

   so did warlike Antony neglect

The worlds which rule for Cleopatra’s sight.

Such wondrous powers both womens fair aspect,

To captive men, and make them all the world reject.

This ‘moral’ reading is there in Plutarch’s version, in which Antony becomes ‘effeminate’ and made ‘subject to a woman’s will.’ He is particularly critical of Antony’s behavior at the Battle of Actium (when he followed the fleeing Cleopatra). ‘There Antonius showed plainly, that he had not only lost the courage and heart of an Emperor, but also of a valiant man, and that he was not his own man…he has so carried away with the vain love of this woman, as if he had been glued unto her, and that she could not have removed without moving of him also.’ In Spenser’s terms, Antony ‘rejected’ the world for the mere love of a woman. Whether he found or made a better world is not, of course, considered. But, while Shakespeare’s play does include these historical-morality elements (unquestionably, his glue-like relationship with Cleopatra ruins him as a politician and spoils him as a soldier, and, in worldly terms, she does – as he recognizes – lead him ‘to the very heart of loss’ – IV.xii.29) – it complicates any ethical ‘reading’ of the story, so there can be no question of seeing it simply as another version of a good soldier losing his empire because of a bad woman. To understand this more clearly, we have to take into account another figure. For, if Octavius Caesar is related to the onward and inexorable movement of History, Antony is related to a god, Hercules.

This relationship is suggested in Plutarch who, however, relates Antony more closely to Bacchus. Shakespeare strengthens the association with Hercules. Hercules was famous for his anger, and so is Antony. As his anger begins to rise, Cleopatra says: ‘Look, prithee, Charmian,/How this Herculean Roman does become/The carriage of his chafe’ (I.iii.84-5). Reacting in fury to Cleopatra’s flight from the battle and what ensues, he cries out:

The shirt of Nessus is upon me, teach me,

Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.

(IV.xii.44-5)

Plutarch refers to Antony being deserted by a god, ‘it is said that suddenly they heard a marvelous sweet harmony of sundry sorts of instruments of music…as they use in Bacchus feasts…Now, such as its reason sought the depth of the interpretation of this wonder, thought it was the god unto whom Antonius bare singular devotion to counterfeit and resemble him, that did forsake them.’ Shakespeare takes the scene, and the interpretation, but makes one telling change. Lat in the play, some soldiers hear ‘Music i’ th’ air’ and decide ‘Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,/Now leaves him.’ (IV.iii.15-16). Where his Antony is concerned – despite his manifest taste for wine – Shakespeare wants us to think more of Hercules, less of Bacchus. Hercules was of course the hero – hero turned god – par excellence. There were many allegories concerning Hercules current by the Middle Ages. One (apparently from the Sophist, Prodicus), has Hercules as a young man arriving at a place where the road branches into two paths, one leading up a steep hill, the other into a pleasant glade. At the dividing point, two fair women meet him; one, modest and sober, urges him to take the steep path; the other, seductive if meretricious, uses her arts in an attempt to attract him into the glade. The hero, of course chooses the steep hill of Virtue over the beckoning glades of Pleasure. There were many medieval and Renaissance depictions of this struggle of Virtue and Pleasure over Hercules (there is a famous Durer engraving of it – Der Hercules), with Pleasure, hedone, voluptas, sometimes associated with Venus. The implications, for us, are quite clear: if Antony is related to Hercules, Cleopatra is related to Venus. The key difference, of course, is that Hercules-Antony chooses Pleasure, pays heed to the solicitation of Venus – thus inverting the traditional moral of this allegory. According then to the accumulated traditional lore which had grown up around the much metamorphosed and allegorized figure of Hercules, Antony is indeed a version of Hercules, but one who, as it were, decided to take the wrong road – not up the steep hill of (Roman) virtue, but off the track into the (oriental) glades of pleasure.

There are other divinities in the play, and if Hercules deserts Antony, he in turn goes on to play Osiris to Cleopatra’s Isis. The union of these divinities assures the fertility of Egypt: in Plutarch’s study of the myth (well known in Shakespeare’s time), Osiris is the Nile which floods and makes fertile the land – he is form, the seminal principle, and Isis is matter. From their union are bred not only crops, but animals, such as the serpents of the Nile. Typhon the crocodile, born of Nile mud, represents for Plutarch the irrational, bestial part of the soul by which Osiris is deceived and torn to pieces. There are, of course, numerous references to the Nile, its floods, its serpents, and so on, in the play, and Shakespeare clearly has this myth actively in mind. But it is not a stable or fixed incorporation. Cleopatra is Isis but also Antony’s ‘serpent of old Nile,’ and by a serpent of Nile will she die – a serpent by a serpent ‘valiantly vanquished,’ as Antony-Osiris is ‘a Roman by a Roman valiantly vanquished’ (that second Roman is more Antony than Caesar – as Cleopatra says: ‘Not Caesar’s valor hath o’erthrown Antony, But Antony’s hath triumphed on itself’ – IV.xv.14-15). The monster-crocodile who destroys Antony is, in this play, Octavius Caesar – though he is hardly seen in those terms. He is a disguised Typhon for Antony and Cleopatra, who are playing at being Osiris and Isis – but, really, he is not in their self-mythologizing act, not in their ‘play’ at all.”

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I’d like to interrupt the discussion of the play with a brief diversion — one of my favorite poems (it is connected) — Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony”

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
your work that failed, your life’s plans
all proving deceptive — don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen — your final delectation — to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

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From Northrop Frye:

“Let’s look at Antony’s death scene, in which, after a bungled attempt at suicide and mortally wounded, he makes his way to Cleopatra’s monument and asks her to come down and give him her last kiss. But Cleopatra has already started on her private war to outwit Caesar’s plan to make her part of his triumph in Rome. It sounds like a restricted operation, but it’s as important to Cleopatra as the mastery of the world is to Caesar. So she apologizes to Antony, but she’s afraid she can’t come down ‘Lest I be taken.’ She must stay in the protection of a monument that would hold up a cohort of Roman legionnaires for about a minute and a half. There’s no help for it: ‘we must draw thee up.’ What follows is a difficult scene to stage, but nobody can miss the humiliation for Antony of this grotesque maneuver, to say nothing of the physical agony of the ordeal for a dying man. ‘Here’s sport indeed! How heavy weighs my lord!’ says Cleopatra. Our minds go back to an earlier scene, when, with Antony absent and Cleopatra stupefied with boredom, she proposed to go fishing, as she used to do with Antony:

     my bended hook shall pierce

Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up,

I’ll think them every one an Antony,

And say ‘Ah ha! y’are caught.’

(II.v.12-15)

To Antony’s exhausted murmur, ‘Give me some wine, and let me speak a little,’ her answer is, ‘No, let me speak, and let me rail.’ When Antony is finally going, she says first, ‘Hast thou no care for me?’, and then breaks into the tremendous rhetoric of her lament for her dead lover. I’m taking phrases out of their contexts a bit, and of course Shakespeare’s really intense scenes are so delicately balanced that emphasizing and overemphasizing any single aspect are almost the same thing.

The reason why Antony is in this situation, and mortally wounded, is that when his fleet surrendered to Caesar he assumed that Cleopatra had betrayed him, and Cleopatra had to counter this threat with the most dramatic action possible: of sending to Antony, by her eunuch Mardian, a report of her death, which Mardian was urged to ‘word piteously.’ All of which still does not show that Cleopatra is a monster of selfishness. Selfishness is a product of calculation, and Cleopatra, at least at the moment of Antony’s death, is not calculating. Her reactions are too instinctive to be called selfish: she’s just being Cleopatra.”

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From Frank Kermode:

“In IV.iii, one of those scenes used by Shakespeare that comment on rather than advance the action, like the Parthian scene (III.i), the soldiers on watch hear the ominous music that means Hercules is abandoning Antony. (In Plutarch the god is Bacchus; Shakespeare takes the moment to emphasize Antony’s claim to protection from his ancestor god.) IN twenty-one lines it does much, giving to the fate of Antony a quasi-mythological grandeur which henceforth infuses much of the verse. Enobarbus deserts: ‘O, my fortunes have/Corrupted honest men! (IV.v.16-17). But the tones of imperial grandeur persist. Antony scores an inconclusive victory and greets Cleopatra as if she were more than human, calling her ‘this great fairy’ (IV.vii.12), while she gives him the welcome due to a god:

     Lord of lords!

O infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from

The world’s great snare uncaught?

(16-18)

The marvel is that in this play bombast, or what ought to be at best nickel silver, is somehow transmuted into fine gold. Given infinite virtue, unlimited manly power, Antony hardly deserves congratulations on managing, like an animal, to escape the hunter; there is a deliberate glory in the greeting, but it has a faintly ill-omened sound.

Fighting by sea again, with all the omens bad, ‘Antony/Is valiant, and dejected, and by starts/His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear/Of what he has, and has not’ (IV.xii.6-9). This is absolutely typical of the mature Shakespeare, part of the run of his mind; it sounds like Macbeth. The point is made by the time we have heard ‘hope and fear,’ but Shakespeare ties another knot in the concluding line, as if to make sure the sense cannot be unbound; this trick gives the reader or listener work to do, relating ‘what he has’ to ‘hope,’ and ‘what he has not’ to ‘fear.’

The final battle lost (‘Fortune and Antony part here’ [IV.xii.19]), Antony again turns on Cleopatra. Deserted by so many of his followers, he utters a very remarkable complaint:

     All come to this? The hearts

That spannel’d me at heels, to whom I gave

Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets

On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark’d,

That overtopp’d them all.

(20-24)

Here is a strange mixture of metaphors; hearts (of course a synecdoche for ‘men’ or, ironically, ‘brave men’ or ‘friends’) that followed him like dogs now melt themselves, and also melt the sweets he has given them, slaving them over Caesar, represented as a tree in blossom compared with Antony, a taller tree but doomed to die by having had its bark stripped away, with a hint of the usual attention dogs give to trees. There are few passages even in this play that whirl so dizzily from one association to another. Antony heard Cleopatra’s ‘discandying’ speech, quoted [earlier], and echoes it in this unrelated passage some time later. Melting is his fate, and it impregnates this complaint.

And so Antony himself melts. The intellectual energy of the verse is now probably more intense than anywhere else in Shakespeare, except possibly in Coriolanus, yet it is never completely wild. Antony asks Eros to consider shapes seen in clouds: ‘That which is now a horse, even with a thought/The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/As water is in water’ (IV.xiv.9-11). ‘Rack’ is a drifting cloud; ‘dislimns’ is an essential, irreplaceably apt new word (later uses are quotations of this one, as the O.E.D. notes); an artist ‘limns’ and the cloud breaking up does the opposite for the horse. Antony is dislimned like the shapes in the cloud; he ‘cannot hold this visible shape’ (14). He adds another complaint against fortune: he has been cheated at cards by the swindler Cleopatra and the lucky Caesar.

Antony’s death calls forth verse of an exalted tone peculiar to this play. ‘The star is fall’n./And time is at his period,’ says the guard (IV.xiv.106-7). Here the note of apocalypse differs from that sounded in Lear (‘Is this the promis’d end? Or image of that horror?’) because it suggests an enormous hyperbole – here the death of one godlike man, ‘the great prince o’ th’ world’ (V.xv.54) is the death of the entire world.

Octavian, however, remains to rule the world, for he is ‘the full-fortun’d Caesar’ (IV.xv.24). But his luck doesn’t quite hold out, for he is thwarted by Cleopatra. She utters her astonishing, almost triumphing lament:

The crowd o’ th’ earth doth melt. My lord!

O, wither’d is the garland of the war,

The soldier’s pole is fall’n. Young boys and girls

Are level now with men; the odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

(IV.xv.63-68)

The grandeur of Antony entitles him to be called the crown of the earth, but again this crown melts; he adorned the world like a victor’s wreath, but the wreath is withered. “pole’ is of grandly uncertain meaning: the pole star (the guard, over Antony’s not quite dead body, says ‘The star is fall’n’ [IV.xiv.107]), possibly the tent pole that upheld the soldier’s world. Each of these figures elevates Antony from ordinary humanity: he is a melting crown, a withered garland suggesting a defeated hero; a heavenly guide or a prop. The rest of the passage says that with Antony all distinction of merit or achievement dies; children are equal to grown men, the unevenness that allows a man to be great, to be an emperor, is abolished. And the conclusion drops into an extraordinary simplicity (‘nothing left remarkable’), qualified only by the strange redundancy of ‘visiting’ – though Cleopatra, resolved on suicide, will also renounced ‘the fleeting moon’ (V.ii.240) as the woman’s ‘planet.’ What is altogether striking about the speech is that it conveys a kind of keening quite unlike the formal expressions of mourning and lamentation found in the mouths of women in the earlier history plays, in place of rhetorical pattern one has a diversity of figure, that restless movement of intelligence that characterizes the later verse of Shakespeare.”

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Isn’t Cleopatra’s constant interruption of Antony’s dying one of the most painfully funny scenes in Shakespeare?

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And from Camille Paglia:

“Cleopatra’s Dionysian multiplicity is richly illustrated throughout the play. For example, when she hears of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, Cleopatra swerves back and forth between extreme emotions five times in the lines (II.v.109-19). Each mood-swing toward and away from Antony, has its own operatic tone, gesture, and posture Critics used to wonder which is the ‘real’ Cleopatra, or where is she? The secondary selves must be cunning stratagems. Worse, the issue of Octavia’s height with hair color, interwoven with Cleopatra’s lamentations and faintings, make the queen seem silly and superficial in academic eyes. How like a woman! But Cleopatra is an actress, and as we shall see, theatricality is the model of human psychology in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra is the sum of her masks.

Cleopatra’s Dionysianism dissolves male into female. The fruitful female principle is so dominant in Shakespeare’s Egyptian Bower of Bliss that male power is dwarfed and stymied. Cleopatra is surrounded by eunuchs, disdained by the Romans. The historical Antony was already a notorious drinker and carouser before he met Cleopatra, but in the play he is charged with Egyptian degeneration after a nobly stoic Roman past. For the Romans, Antony suffers a reduction of identity through his feminizing association with Cleopatra. But Shakespeare see it as an aggrandizement of identity which Antony, unlike Rosalind, is unable to control. Cleopatra recalls a transvestite game where she decked Antony in her robes and headdress while she strapped on his battle sword (II.v.22-23). This detail is not in Plutarch, though everything else in the passage is. Surely Shakespeare is directly addressing Spenser here. He takes Artegall’s transvestite enslavement to the Amazon queen and recasts it with Dionysian dramatic energy. What is shameful and depressing in Spenser becomes playful and mirthful. Artegall is at a dead end. But Shakespeare’s transvestite Antony and Cleopatra give the impression of vitality, of identity opening and multiplying. Exchange of clothing is a paradigm for the emotional union of love. Antony and Cleopatra so interpenetrate that they are mistaken for one another (I.ii.80)

Even before she absorbs Antony’s identity, Cleopatra is robustly half-masculine. Rivaled only by Rosalind, Cleopatra appropriates the powers and prerogatives of both sexes more lavishly than any other character in literature. Her sexual personae are energized by stormy infusions of Dionysian nature-force. Here Rosalind is more limited because more civilized. Cleopatra is psychically immersed in the irrational and barbaric. She is voluptuously female, a rarity in Shakespeare. Her sexuality is so potent in European terms that the Romans are always call her whore, strumpet, trull. As the ‘serpent of old Nile,’ she is the archetypal femme fatale (I.v.25). Cleopatra appears costumed as Isis, whom as queen she literally embodies. Her main distinction from the mocking Rosalind is her materialism, which makes her cradle the asp like ‘my baby at my breast’ (V.ii.509). the mother is one of Cleopatra’s many personae, but Rosalind and Spenser’s Britomart will become mothers only outside the frame of their works. This is because the archetype behind Rosalind is the chaste beautiful boy. Cleopatra is a virago, the androgynous type I found in Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel nudes, with their thrusting breasts. Rosalind inhabits the crisp Forest of Arden, the Northern European green world. But Cleopatra belongs to the heat-enervated Orient, whose oppressiveness hangs over Michelangelo’s women. Cleopatra is not more feminine than Rosalind, but she is far more female. Cleopatra greets the messenger: ‘Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears.’ (II.v.24). A pagan Annunciation. Physically craving the absent Antony, Cleopatra is a sexual vessel forcibly filled. Yet the penetrating force is hers; she invokes it by command. Her overwrought metaphor incidentally implied a touch of homosexual per version in the murder-by-ear of Hamlet senior in his drowsy Spenserian bower.

Cleopatra’s male persona is equally strong. As queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, like Hatshepsut, is an impersonation of a royal male. Janet Adelman suggests that Cleopatra wearing Antony’s sword is a Renaissance Venus armata and that for battle at Actium she would appear in male dress. Psychologically, Cleopatra is always armed. She has a fiery belligerence. She threatens to bloody her maid’s teeth; she even threatens Antony, using a pun which advertises her penis-envy (I.iii.40-41; ii.58-61). When the messenger arrives with news of Antony’s marriage, Cleopatra moves beyond threats to actual assault and battery, hitting him, hauling him up and down, and pulling a knife. Such scenes caused the long critical resistance to Cleopatra. By modern middle-class standards, they require defense. Shakespeare gives Cleopatra an intemperate flair for masculine violence unique in the sympathetic portrayal of women in literature. The violence of Medea or Lady Macbeth is transient, either male-inspired or deflected through a male’s action. In Cleopatra violence is constantly present as a potential male persona. It is the raging warfare of her hermaphrodite character. For parallels we must go to villainesses like Lear’s daughters or outside social literature to mythic horrors like Scylla. Into Cleopatra as Isis flows the untransformed energy of nature, sheer sex and violence.

Is it unseemly for queens to brawl? Dionysian beings instinctively subvert the hierarchical. As an Italian, I have little problem reconciling violence with culture. Rousseau drove the wedge between aggression and culture, so colorfully united in the Renaissance. Cleopatra’s pugilistic energy is matched by her sadistic imagination and flights of daemonic metaphor, where eyeballs are punted like footballs and whipped bodies steeped in pickle brine. (II.v.63-66). Shakespeare shows us the turbulent emotion-in-action of the Dionysian androgyne. Language seethes like boiling oil. Cleopatra’s rabid speeches sound more shocking to an Anglo-American than to Mediterranean ears. A savage vehemence of speech is common among southern peoples, due to the nearness of agriculture and the survival of pagan intensity. Those who live on and by the land recognize nature’s terrible amorality. Cleopatra’s sadistic images are normal in Italian terms. My immigrant relatives used to say, ‘May you be killed!’ ‘May you be eaten by a cat!’ Common Italian-American expressions, according to my father, took the form ‘Che te possono’ (May such and such be done to you). For example, ‘May your eyes be torn out,’ ‘May you drag your tongue along the ground,’ ‘May they squeeze your testicles,’ ‘May they sew up your anus.’ The similarity to Cleopatra’s rhetorical style is obvious. Torture and homicide are immediately accessible to the Mediterranean imagination.

I called Dionysian impulses sadistic, but the proper term is sadomasochistic, both active and passive. Provoked, Cleopatra is off on runaway flights of masochistic vision. It is the psychic countercurrent to her aggression, what Heracleitus calls emantiodromia, ‘running to its opposite.’ When Antony calls her ‘cold-hearted,’ she blurts out a surreal fantasy of poison hail, blighted wombs, and unburied bodies covered with flies and gnats (III.xiii.158-67). Taken prisoner, she storms that, preferable to jeers I Rome, let her naked corpse be thrown into the mud and swelled up by waterflies – or hung in chains on a pyramid (V.ii.55-62). Cleopatra’s sadomasochistic imagination makes Dionysian leaps through nature. Her body is the earth mother torn by the strife of the elements in the cycle of birth and death. Ugliness, pain, abortion, and decay are nature’s reality. Cleopatra’s rough speech has a daemonic eloquence. Shakespeare opens a window into the unconscious, where we see the sex and violence we carry within us. There is the grinding dreamwork, spewing out metaphors which appall us. Cleopatra’s images tumble out with bruising force, like the boulders tossed like chaff in Coleridge’s underground river.

The passionately active Cleopatra contrasts with feminine, retiring Octavia. Chaste Octavia is a ‘swan’s-down father’ on the tide: she is will-less, the pawn of larger forces. She is of ‘a holy, cold, and still conversation,’ a model Roman matron. She moves so primly ‘She shows a body rather than a life,/A statue than a breather.’ (III.ii.48/ II.vi.l22-23); III.iii.23-24). Like brother, like sister. In Shakespeare, iconic Apollonian statues are dead wood. Cleopatra’s Dionysian proteanism and velocity take Shakespeare’s eye. He makes Octavia’s virtue seem torpid. Octavia is matter and Cleopatra energy. Cleopatra is scourge, not feather. Her dominion over gender is dramatized in athletic transformations of dizzying speed. ‘I am pale, Charmian,’ she murmurs – and a line later leaps at the messenger and slugs him to the floor (II.v.59-61). Cleopatra vaults from one sexual extreme to the other, barely taking breath. The delicate Lady of the Camellias switch-hits with burly Ajax. The genders so indiscriminately mingle in Cleopatra that she makes transsexual word errors under stress. (II.v.40-41, 116, 145). Cleopatra has a Dionysian all-inclusiveness. She breaks through social restraints to plunge into the sensual, orgiastic pleasure of pure feeling.

Cleopatra embodies the Dionysian principle of theatricality. Shakespeare often makes analogies between personality and stagecraft but never, save in Hamlet, so systematically as he does in Antony and Cleopatra. From first scene to last, public and private behavior is critiqued in terms of performance. Politics itself is stage-managed. Antony and Cleopatra are always going in and out of their legendary roles as Antony and Cleopatra. For Cleopatra, life is theater. She is a master propagandist. Truth is inconsequential; dramatic values are supreme. Cleopatra shamelessly manipulates others’ emotions like clay. Once her cleverness misfires, when she sends word she is dead and Antony kills himself. Cleopatra resembles Rosalind in the gleeful way she throws herself into a role. This is so even at her lowest moment, when she scripts her suicide. Like Rosalind, Cleopatra is producer and star of play’s end. She makes a masque-like tableau of her own death. Shakespeare presses Renaissance theatricality beyond moral norms. Metamorphoses are horrific for both Spenser and Dante, who consigns impersonation to one of the lowest circles of the Inferno: incestuous Myrrha, ‘falsifying herself in another’s form,’ is classed with liars and counterfeiters (XXX.41). Puritan hostility to theater was justified. Secular theater is Greco-Roman and therefore pagan. Shakespeare makes Cleopatra his accomplice and advocate for dramatic impersonation.

Cleopatra has a sensational flair for improvisation and melodrama. Her vamping and camping are more extreme than Rosalind’s as Ganymede. Cleopatra’s postures of romantic martyrdom are as self-parodying as a drag queen’s. Self-parody is always sex-parody. The virtuoso tone of Cleopatra’s theatrics recurs in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, where it clearly springs from wholesale desexualization of the characters. Cleopatra’s moment of maximum consciousness of persona is when she sets aside both feminine swooning and masculine intimidation for a briskly efficient interrogation of the messenger. She extorts intelligence on Octavia’s age, height, voice, hair, and face shape (III.iii). I consider this neglected scene one of the classic moments in all drama. A game of personae is being played. Cleopatra is mentally auditioning Octavia, cattily revising her virtues downward, always with her rival’s theatrical impact on Antony in mind. Cleopatra is gracious and queenly, but we tangibly feel her sense of her persona, as well as her maid Charmian’s sense of it. Charmian, like a church deacon, keeps piping up the required response, in ritual antiphony. Shakespeare makes us see Cleopatra’s detachment from her masks and her complete identification with them. Her showy self-representations have both intellectual duality and hierarchic authority. Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s despotic Muse of drama.”

The only character in literature whose theatrical personae rival Cleopatra’s is Auntie Mame. Patrick Dennis’ Auntie Mame (1955) is the American Alice in Wonderland and in my view more interesting and important than any ‘serious’ novel after World War II. The original book is far sharper than the wonderful play and movie (1958), starring the great Rosalind Russell. The subsequent musical and Lucille Ball movie (1974) are of little worth, turning the regal Auntie Mame into trivial spunk and cuddles. I mentioned Auntie Mame as a type of the Mercurius androgyne. She is an archaeologist of persona. Each event, each phase of life is registered in a change of costume and interior décor. Style and substance are one, in the Wildean manner. When the story opens in the Twenties, Auntie Mame is in her Chinese period, her Beekman Place apartment as exotic as Shakespeare’s Egypt. Like Cleopatra, Auntie Mame stands for a flamboyant, extravagant, wine-drenched, ethnically diverse world threatened by a rationalist prude, the WASP banker Mr. Babcock, Mame’s Caesar-like chief antagonist. Like Cleopatra, Mame is attended by androgynes – a giggling eunuch-like Japanese houseboy, a virago confidante (the actress and drunk, Vera Charles), and epicene party-guests (a ‘woman-man and man-woman’). Like Cleopatra, Mame is bossy, peremptory, and given to ‘a little half-hour show of histrionics,’ her lifetime habit.’ Like Cleopatra, she has so many feminine personae that, mysteriously, she ends up ceasing to seem female at all. My Hermes/Mercury principle: a multitude of personae suspends gender. One remembers Mame’s long green lacquered fingernails and sweeping bamboo cigarette holder, her Oriental robe of embroidered golden silk, her black satin sheets and bed jacket of pink ostrich feathers. Panic and crisis: how does one dress for Scarsdale? ‘Any discussion of clothing always won Auntie Mame’s undivided attention.’ Trying to avoid a Georgia fox hunt, Mame ‘powdered herself dead white’ and put on ‘an unbecoming shade of green.’ Auntie Mame is a study of multiple impersonations, the theatrical principle of western selfhood. Emotion is instantly objectified. Costume, speech, and manner are a public pagan language of the inner life.

Expiring with emotion upon learning of her new rival, Cleopatra manages to convey to her envoy, ‘Let him not leave out the color of her hair.’ Like Auntie Mame, Cleopatra, a creature of theater, sees persona as a mirror of soul. The pagan folk sciences, astrology, palmistry, and phrenology, have never forgotten that externals are truth. Beauty is only skin-deep, you can’t tell a book by its cover: these pious axioms come from a contrary moral tradition. The aesthete, who lives in a world of surfaces, and the male homosexual, who lives in a world of masks, believes in the absoluteness of externals. That is why Auntie Mame was a diva of homosexuals. Cleopatra’s multiple personae are far from feminine fickleness. She represents a radical theatricality in which the inner world is completely transformed into the outer.”

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Or, as Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…”

And that above excerpt from Paglia is why I love Paglia.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3ts0gmbEw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tpx5zjI_UQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xAa-69jiWk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE43BbzUnWs

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning, more on Act Four before we plunge into the glory that is Act Five.

Enjoy.

Antony and Cleopatra

Act Five, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Five:  When Antony dies, Cleopatra sees death as her only option, but she is prevented from stabbing herself by Caesar’s soldiers. When Dolabella reveals that Caesar intends to march her as his captive through the streets of Rome, Cleopatra is (naturally) appalled, and resolved to die at once. Placing asps to her breast and arm, she predicts her reunion with Antony in the afterlife. Caesar, discovering her body, arranges for the loves to share a tomb.

It is interesting to note that while Antony dies in Act Four, the play does not end there.  Instead, we have one incredible, drawn-out final scene, located in Cleopatra’s monument as the Romans close in on her, which proves that the play is, indeed, a double tragedy. Some (if not most) of Cleopatra’s most passionately beautiful speeches about her lover occur only when he is dead, and underline the fantasy that was at the heat of their relationship. “I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony,” she says to Dolabella. “His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm/Crested the world…Realms and island were/As plates dropped from his pocket.” The image is deliberately unreal, and when Cleopatra asks, “Think you there was, or might be, such a man/As this I dreamt of,” Dolabella’s only possible reply is “Gentle madam, no.” (5.2.81-93)

But aside from fantasies of Antony, Cleopatra’s life is no longer under her control – the Romans have her there, and control is something she’s not at all prepared or able to relinquish. She cannot live to be paraded through Rome like a “strumpet,” to be jeered at by the Roman mob; she cannot bear the thought that “quick comedians” will put them on stage, that

      Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’th’ posture of a whore.

(5.2.216-7)

The dramatic ironies are nearly overwhelming: on Shakespeare’s stage Cleopatra was already played by a “boy,” possibly the same talented actor who created the roles of Lady Macbeth and Volumnia (from our next play, Coriolanus). But only Cleopatra can be the star in her own tragedy, and so she puts on her queenly garments for the last time, expresses her “immortal longings,” and arranges her own death just like the great actress she is.

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From Garber:

“Dolabella, one of Octavius’s soldiers, is sent to guard the Queen. And it is with Dolabella that Cleopatra has a conversation that provides, in effect, the apotheosis for Antony. Notice that this is not a soliloquy [MY NOTE:  Cleopatra doesn’t have soliloquies – she NEEDS an audience.] any more than Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus was a soliloquy. In both cases the great vision of one speaker is interrupted, periodically, by the skeptical interjections of another, and the result is a sharper picture of transformed and transformative greatness. Notice, too, that this conversation begins, once more, by invoking ‘boys’ and ‘women,’ conventionally unreliable sources:

Cleopatra:

You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams;

Isn’t not your trick?

Dolabella:

I understand not, madam.

Cleopatra:

I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony.

O, such another sleep, that I might see

But such another man!

Dolabella:

If it might please ye –

Cleopatra:

His face was as the heav’ns, and therein struck

A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted

The little O o’th’ earth.

Dolabella:

Most sovereign creature –

Cleopatra:

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

Crested the world. His voice was propertied

As all the tuned sphere, and that to friends;

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t; an autumn ‘twas,

That grew the more by reaping. His delights

Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above

The element they lived in. In his livery

Walked crowns and coronets. Realms and islands were

As plates dropped from his pocket.

Dolabella:

Cleopatra –

Cleopatra:

Think you there was, or might be, such a man

As this I dreamt of?

Dolabella:

Gentle madam, no.

Cleopatra:

You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.

But if there be, or ever were one such,

It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine

An Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy,

Condemning shadows quite.

(5.2.73-99)

In Cleopatra’s vision Antony becomes a god, a tutelary spirit. Like a Colossus he bestrides the ocean, like Cleopatra herself he is infinitely fertile, infinitely generous (‘For his bounty,/There was no winter in’t; an autumn ‘twas,/That grew the more by reaping’).

‘Think you there was, or might be, such a man/As this I dreamt of?’ ‘Gentle madam, no.’ ‘No’ is the answer of Rome, the answer of realism and politics. But Cleopatra knows better. She knows that the reality of Antony is more remarkable than what the imagination can conceive. Like Cleopatra’s herself in Enobarbus’s description (‘O’er-picturing that Venue where we see/The fancy outwork nature’), he puts fantasy (‘fancy’) at odds with nature. In Cleopatra’s vision, Antony is reborn, and he takes his place as a kind of constellation in the sky, a tutelary emblem of love. This is an astonishing lyric moment in the play, the true pendant to Enobarbus’s description of the two lovers’ first meeting on the Cydnus. Tellingly, as she prepares for her own death, Cleopatra will choose to relive that moment: ‘I am again for Cydnus/To meet Mark Antony.’ (5.2.224-225)

And yet in this truly extraordinary play, there are more twists and turns to come. For the image of Antony as a natural work of art that defeats all art, as a man who transcends all dreams dreamt by mere boys or women, is closely followed by Cleopatra’s own rueful, and doubtless prophetic, vision of what would happen to her if she returned as a captive to Rome. There she would be made a spectacle. There she, and her waiting-woman, would be impersonated on a public stage, the pleasant Egyptian art of playacting turned to deadly ridicule in Rome (or in Jacobean England):

     The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels. Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’th’ posture of a whore.

(5.2.212-217)

This would be the greatest indignity of all, for Cleopatra, the woman of women, the Venue, the Muse, the Dido, the serpent of old Nile, to be acted on the stage by a boy – a boy like the insolent and ambitious ‘boy Caesar.’ A boy Caesar who has, in some sense, wished to play Antony to her Cleopatra, perhaps even Cleopatra to his Antony.

But of course on the Jacobean stage Cleopatra would have been played by a boy. Like Juliet, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and indeed every female character in Shakespeare who has come to stand in modern literary culture as some essential avatar of womanhood, Cleopatra was originally played by a boy actor, an accomplished stylist of femininity. Shakespeare’s company contained no women, and no women were permitted to appear on the public stage. In the first performances of this play, a boy would have played the part of Cleopatra, and spoken, feelingly, her passionate lines about the ‘squeaking Cleopatra’ who would ‘boy’ – and thus, she seems to say, parody or caricature – her ‘greatness’ on the stage in a foreign land. We may recall the love games of Egypt, the carefree and erotic playacting in which Cleopatra exchanged clothing with Antony (‘[I] put my tires and mantles on him…/I wore his sword Philippan’). Once again in a major Shakespearean tragedy we have a moment onstage that takes a huge dramaturgical risk, like the leap of Gloucester from Dover ‘cliff’ in King Lear, where the actor ‘fell’ not from a height, but from flat ground to flat ground. In this case the risk is, if possible, even more acute. Could we not, as a good Jacobean audience, see through the web of fictions, and say to ourselves, ‘It is a boy’? Would the ‘boy my greatness’ speech not provoke precisely the frame-breaking ridicule that Cleopatra here expressly says she fears?

The magic of the moment is such that – in most production, at least, unless they are calculated to go against the grain – we never come near such a feeling of theatrical disillusionment. The fictive character of Cleopatra is strong that she defeats mere ‘reality,’ if that is what we should cal it – the fact that in Shakespeare’s time she was acted by a boy, and that in any time the audience is seeing some version of what she predicts they will see in Caesar’s Rome, a play that shows Antony a drunk, Cleopatra a whore. Rather, this theatrical moment is a brilliant demonstration of what Cleopatra has just said to Dolabella about Antony, that the reality is great than what is merely imagined. But here it is the fiction, the legend, the character who is ‘real.’ Cleopatra is more enduring as a character than any actor or actress who portrays her, and this is her fullest and most conclusive transcendence.

The play now partners this apotheosis with a series of gestures that bring her out of time and into legend:

    I have nothing

Of woman in me. Now from head to foot

I am marble-constant…

(5.2.234-236)

Cleopatra has not rejected her womanhood, like the Lady Macbeth of ‘unsex me here.’ She has instead gone beyond it, become ‘marble-constant,’ a steadfast work of art. It is at this point that the Clown enters, with his ‘pretty worm/Of Nilus,’ the asp, carried in a basket of figs. As we have already noticed, the basket of figs is a sign of fertility. The snake adds sex and death, and summons the image, for a Judeo-Christian audience, of seduction in Eden. This Clown is a close relation of other sublimely comic and serious Shakespearean low figures, with their unintentionally meaningful malapropisms and clear-eyed acceptance of human foibles: Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the gravedigger (First Clown) in Hamlet, the Porter in Macbeth. Like them he speaks in unconscious truths, his observations more telling than he knows. Thus he can say of the poisonous snake he delivers to the Queen,

I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it seldom or never recover.

(5.2.240-243)

‘[H]is biting is immortal.’ The Clown means ‘mortal,’ deadly – but he is righter than he realizes. He brings the worm of Nilus, representative of water, in a basket of figs, the emblem of the earth, to a queen who is now all fire and air, all transmigration and transcendence. Given Cleopatra’s consummate erotic nature, the snake is also, of course, a sexual symbol. ‘Yes, forsooth,’ the Clown says, ‘I wish you joy o’th’ worm’ (5.2.270).

Performance and playing are now for Cleopatra wholly merged with reality:

Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have

Immortal longings in me…

(5.2.271-272)

She arrays herself as she once dressed for her meeting with Antony on the Cydnus, appropriating all symbolic roles at once, actress and goddess, mother, lover, and Muse. Nursing the asp at her breast as she had nursed the children of her fertility, defeating in this perversely expressive gesture of nurture and death the ‘boy’ Octavius, adopted son of her earlier lover, she turns to address the snake as deliverer:

With they sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

Of life at once untie…

(5.2.295-296)

‘Intrinsicate’ is both intricate and intrinsic. The man who could untie the Gordian knot was fated, said legend, to rule all of Asia. Alexander trumped the legend by cutting the knot with his sword. But the world that Cleopatra comes to rule, when she unties the knot intrinsicate of life, is even wider and more inclusive than ‘Asia,’ than Rome and Egypt, for it is the world of imagination, play, and art.

Yet this is a ‘history’ play, as well as tragedy, The story it tells is true in chronicle as well as mythic terms, and the play belongs to time as well as to timelessness, to the Plutarchan lesson about rule (and women) as well as to the Shakespearean vision of what fiction can to do mere fact, when deployed with such transgressive mastery. Predictably it is Caesar, the instrument of order, who has the last word in the play – Caesar, who has sent ‘[t]oo slow a messenger,’ and who himself arrives too late on the scene. As Caesar contemplates the spectacle of the dead Cleopatra, he comes to perceive that he is viewing the ultimate paradox, the death of a principle of life. Here is his epitaph for the lovers who have eluded him in death as in life:

No grave upon the earth shall clip in it

A pair so famous. High events as these

Strike those that make them, and their story is

No less in pity than his glory which

Brought them to be lamented…

(5.2.349-353)

Although it begins as the tragedy of Antony, the play is transformed, by its close, into the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, giving equal weight to each of its titanic titular heroes, and blending history and tragedy into a sublime transumptive genre. His glory is history. their story is legend, Pity, that quintessential tragic emotion, evoked by catharsis in Aristotle’s account, is what is produced here by the ‘[h]igh events’ in the life, love, and death of Antony and Cleopatra. Once again, it is the play, the work of art, that ‘clips’ or clasps them, that is both the grave they transcend and the monument that keeps the legendary lovers alive to the present day. Cleopatra’s death manifestly enacts that same sexual pun on ‘dying’ that has been performed, as well as cited, throughout the play (‘I am dying, Egypt, dying’; ‘I wish you joy o’th’ worm’). As she stages her own death as a return to the moment that brought the lovers together for the first time – ‘I am again for Cydnus/To meet Mark Antony’ – she defeats death, onstage and offstage, with her ‘immortal longings.’ For both Antony and Cleopatra, the play’s last acts are a dying into life, a dying into legend. Metaphor – two things becoming one – is their metaphor.

Octavius Caesar’s final, moving lines – spoken, as is usual at the close of Shakespearean tragedy, by the political survivor – are at once an attempt at control and an acknowledgement of his limits. As the Roman vanquisher of female power and ‘effeminizing’ passion – passion that inflames a man to love – he has, for the moment, restored a kind of order to both stage and world. As a historical actor, the August Caesar (or Caesar Augustus) of Roman and of Christian history, he has a major role to play. Yet the play that presents him is not, finally, content with history. Octavius is locked in time, in space, and in mortality. But for Cleopatra, the quintessence of paradox, the end is the beginning, the play waits only to begin itself once more, and always, as poetry begins itself again and always. This is as clear to the spectators on the stage as it is to readers and audiences across the centuries:

     [S]he looks like sleep,

As she would catch another Antony

In her strong toil of grace.

(5.2.336-338)

Significantly, in the second half of the play, Antony’s chief attendant, whom he will ask to assist him in running on his sword, is not Enobarbus but a soldier by the name of Eros. The name of the soldier is found in Shakespeare’s source in Plutarch, but Plutarch does not comment on its uncanny aptness; Shakespeare takes this apparent happenstance and makes it into a dramatic commentary, having his Antony call on ‘Eros’ repeatedly in the scene in which he urges Eros to help him with his suicide (much as Macbeth, in a similar doubled context, called on his attendant ‘Seyton’). When Eros, unwilling to kill his master, instead runs on his own sword, Antony learns the lesson from his death, and from the supposed death of Cleopatra that has provoked this high drama:

     Thrice nobler than myself,

Thou reachest me, O valiant Eros, what

I should and thou couldn’t not. My queen and Eros

Have by their brave instruction got upon me

A nobleness in record. But I will be

A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t

As to a lover’s bed. Come then, and, Eros,

Thy master dies thy scholar…

(4.15.95-102)

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From Bloom:

“Never easy to interpret, Cleopatra in Act V is at her subtlest in her dialogue with Dolabella, whom she half-seduces, as is her style. She begins with her ‘dream’ of Antony, a godlike catalogue that stresses his munificence: ‘His delights/Were dolphin-like, they show’d his back above/The element they lived in.’ This is the prelude to the crucial interchange that determines Cleopatra’s suicide:

Cleopatra:

Think you there was, or might be such a man

As this I dreamt of?

Dolabella:

Gentle madam, no.

Cleopatra:

You like up to the hearing of the gods.

But if there be, or ever were one such,

It’s past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with fancy, yet to imagine

An Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy,

Condemning shadows quite.

Dolabella:

Hear me, good madam:

Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it

As answering to the weight: would I might never

O’ertake pursued success, but I do feel,

By the rebound of yours, a brief that smites

My very heart at root.

Cleopatra:

I thank you, sir:

Know you what Caesar means to do with me?

Dolabella:

I am loath to tell you what I would you knew.

Cleopatra:

Nay, pray you, sir, –

Dolabella:

Though he be honorable, –

Cleopatra:

He’ll lead me then in triumph.

Dolabella:

Madam, he will. I know’t.

(V.ii.93-100)

Dolabella, we sense, would be her next lover, if time and circumstances permitted it, but Shakespeare’s time will not relent. In Dryden’s All for Love, Dolabella and Cleopatra undergo a strong mutual attraction, and Dryden for good measure throws in a flirtation between Ventidius and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s Dolabella, an ambitious politician, as he was in Plutarch, is so smitten by Cleopatra’s passionate grief that he risks his own career by confirming her nightmare vision of being led in triumph. She is at her canniest in the subsequent scene with Octavius, persuasively enacting her outrage at being exposed at holding back half her wealth from the conqueror. Thus assured that she intends to live, Octavius withdraws, and her opportunity for death and transfiguration is preserved. ‘Again for Cydnus,/To meet Mark Antony,’ she calls for her ‘best attires.’

The summit of this magnificent play comes in the interlude with the Clown just before the apotheosis of Cleopatra’s suicide, an interlude that sustains Janet Adelman’s contention that Shakespeare’s ‘insistence upon scope, upon the infinite variety of the world, militates against the tragic experience.’ Uncanny perspectives abound throughout Antony and Cleopatra, but the Clown’s is the most unnerving. He dominates the interchange with Cleopatra, as her charm first melts his misogyny and then resolidifies it when he fails to persuade her against her resolve. Few exchanges in the world’s literature are as poignant and as subtle as these, in which the Clown offers Cleopatra the fatal asp:

Clown:  Very good: give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth the feeding.

Cleopatra:  Will it eat me?

How difficult it is to categorize that childlike ‘Will it eat me?’ Perhaps Cleopatra, before mounting into death and divine transfiguration, needs a final return to the playful element in her self that is her Falstaffian essence, the secret to her seductiveness. In the Clown’s repetition of ‘I wish you joy o’ the worm,’ we hear something beyond his phallic misogyny, a prophecy perhaps of Cleopatra’s conversion of the painful ecstasy of her dying into an erotic epiphany of nursing both Antony and her children by her Roman conquerors. Her artfulness and Shakespeare’s fuse together in a blaze of value that surmounts the equivocations of every mode of love in Shakespeare.

Cleopatra’s best epitaph is more impressive for being spoken by Octavius, far unlikelier than Dolabella to be captured by the enchantress:

     she looks like sleep,

As she would catch another Antony

In her strong toil of grace.

(V.ii.344-46)

Not at all ‘another Antony,’ Octavius surpasses himself in this tribute to her seductive powers. By now, the audience very likely is, or should be, the world, and is crowded by multiple perspectives. ‘Will it eat me?’ jostles with ‘I wish you joy o’ the worm,’ and both are set a little to one side by our hope, against hope, that there is one more Antony for her to catch.”

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And finally for today, from Jan Kott:

“Cleopatra is twenty-nine years old at the opening of the tragedy and thirty-nine years old at its close Antony is forty-three in the first scene and fifty-three in his last scene. This is not just the matter of historic chronology. Romeo and Juliet s a tragedy of first love. For these young lovers, in their abandon, the world does not exist. That is, perhaps, why they choose death so easily. Antony and Cleopatra is the story of love as experienced by mature adults. Even their embrace is bitter: they know it is a challenge and that they will have to pay for it. A seed of hate is inherent from the start in this love of the royal lovers. Neither Antony nor Cleopatra wants to give up their inner freedom; they accept love as if under duress, and they want to gain the upper hand over their partner.

Antony breaks away from Cleopatra, returns to Rome, concludes a marriage of convenience. He fights, but not with himself; he fights for the mastery of the world. He returns to Egypt again, and suffers a decisive defeat. He is beaten. Cleopatra wants to keep him, and to retain Egypt for herself. She mobilizes all resources, tries all possibilities, she is both brave and cowardly; faithful and ready to betray when she must, if she can sell herself to the new Caesar and save her kingdom. In Shakespeare’s world even rulers do not have the freedom of choice. History is not an abstract term, but a practical mechanism. Cleopatra loses, in the same way as Antony. She does not lose the battle with her own passion; she loses as a queen. She can only be a captive of the new Caesar and take part in his triumph as its main attraction.

Cleopatra can stay with Antony. But Cleopatra loves the Antony who is one of the pillars of the world; Antony the invincible general. Antony who has lost, who has been defeated, is not Antony. Antony can stay with Cleopatra. But Antony loves Cleopatra the goddess of the Nile. Cleopatra, who will be a captive of Caesar’s, who will be pointed at in the streets of Rome, is no more Cleopatra.

Antony and Cleopatra make their final choice only after their defeat. The choice which for Racine would in itself be a subject for a five-act tragedy. In Shakespeare it is a compulsory choice. But a compulsory choice does not detract from his heroes’ greatness. Antony and Cleopatra become the great lovers only in Acts IV and V. And not just great lovers. They pronounce judgment on the world. At the close of the play the theme of the exposition returns. Heaven and earth are too small for love. Antony’s words will be repeated by Cleopatra just before her death:

     ‘Tis paltry to be Caesar.

……………………………..

          it is great

To do that thing that ends all other deeds,

Which shackles incidents and bolts up change,

Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,

The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.

(V.2)

In Richard III the entire kingdom turned out to be worth less than a horse. A swift horse may save one’s life. Antony and Cleopatra do not want to flee, and have nowhere to escape to. ‘Kingdoms are but ashes.’ In both these great plays, power and those who wield it have been judged. And there will be no appeal. When a hero of Racine’s kills himself, the tragedy is over, and, simultaneously, the world and history cease to exist. In fact they never have existed. When Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves, the tragedy is over, but history and the world go on existing. The funeral oration over the corpses of Antony and Cleopatra is spoken by the victorious triumvir, Octavius, the future Augustus Caesar. A very similar oration over Hamlet’s body has been spoken by Fortinbras. He is still talking, but the stage is empty. All the great ones have gone. And the world has become flat.”

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What did you think of the play?  Of Antony?  Of Cleopatra?

More to come in my next post, Thursday evening/Friday morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gsaNg7Mm4I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjBbHygq0DE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2VYzo8w-hg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz_Bz6kkMyg

Enjoy

Antony and Cleopatra

Act Five, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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From Tony Tanner:

“Cleopatra is, of course, above all a great actress. She can play with Antony to beguile him; she can play at being Isis, thus anticipating her own move towards transcendence; and she can ‘play’ at her death, easily outplaying Caesar’s crafty political deviousness. In this way, she completely transforms her desolate state, not submitting to the downward turn of fortune, but inverting it into the occasion of her own triumph of the imagination:

My desolation does begin to make

A better life. ‘Tis paltry to be Caesar:

Not being fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,

A minister of her will…

(V.ii.1-4)

Cleopatra will be her own Fortune – a triumph of the ‘will.’

She is aware that Caesar will display her in Rome, and that her life with Antony will be ‘staged’ in a degraded form, in keeping with that tendency of Roman rhetoric to devalue and translate downwards the life associated with Egypt:

     The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels: Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’ th’ posture of a whore.

(V.ii.216-21)

(Which, of course, exactly describes what is going on in the Elizabethan theatre at that moment, with some boy ‘squeaking’ Cleopatra. This is not Nabokovian self-reflexivity. Rather, it is effectively as if the drama is so incandescent that it is scorning its own resources, shedding the very medium to put its poetry into flight. It is as though ‘representation’ is scorching itself away to reveal the thing itself – an electrifying moment of astonishing histrionic audacity and magic.) So – Cleopatra puts on her own plan, on her own stage, with her own costume, speeches, and gestures:

     Now, Charmian!

Show me, my women, like a queen: go fetch

My best attires. I am again for Cydnus,

To meet Mark Antony. Sirrah Iras, go…

And when thou hast done this chare, I’ll give thee leave

To play till doomsday – Bring our crown and all.

(V.ii.227-32)

My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing

Of woman in me: now from head to foot

I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon

No planet is of mine.

(V.ii.238-41)

[MY NOTE:  How beautiful are those lines!]

She is moving beyond the body, beyond time, beyond the whole world of transience and decay, beyond her own planet the moon, with all that it implies of tidal periodicity. The clown enters with his figs, which contain the serpent she will use for her suicide (at the beginning, Charmian says ‘I love long life better than figs’ – I.ii.32 – by the end this, like so much else, is reversed: Cleopatra likes figs better than long life). We move to her final self-apotheosis, played with great dignity and ceremony, at which Cleopatra is at once   her own directress and her own priestess:

Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have

Immortal longings in me…

…Husband, I come:

Now to that name my courage prove my title!

I am fire, and air; my other elements

I give to baser life…

(V.ii.280-90)

Out of the earth, mud, dung, water associated with the Nile and its fertility, she has distilled an essence composed only of the higher elements, air and fire. She is ‘marble’ for the duration of the performance; she is also, like Antony, ‘melting,’ dissolving, but melting into a higher atmosphere She gives a farewell kiss to Iras who falls down dead – perhaps from poison, perhaps from grief – and Cleopatra comments:

     Dost thou like still?

If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world

It is not worth leave-taking.

(V.ii.306-8)

To the snake she says:

     O, couldst thou speak,

That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass

Unpolicied!

(V.ii.306-8)

She has seen through Caesar’s tricks and stratagems – ‘He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not/Be noble to myself’ (V.ii.191-2); she knows, too, that he uses language instrumentally, merely for devious political ends. And when Proculeus refers to Caesar’s ‘bounty,’ she knows that it is but a pitiful and transparent travesty of the real bounty of Antony. In her superbly performed death, we see the triumph of the ‘oriental’ imagination over the ‘alphabetic’ utilitarianism of Caesar. The world will indeed be his, and another kind of Empire inaugurated; but from the perspective of Cleopatra, and just for the duration of the play, it seems a world ‘not worth leave-taking.’ So her last words are an incomplete question: ‘What should I stay –‘ as she passes out of language, body, world, altogether. There is no staying her now. Charmian completes her question with her own final speech:

In this wild world? So, fare thee well.

Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies

A lass unparalleled. Downy windows close;

And golden Phoebus never be beheld

Of eyes again so royal! Your crown’s awry;

I’ll mend it, and then play –

(V.ii.314-19)

Thus Cleopatra, and her girls, play their way out of the reach of history, with an intensity of self-sustaining, self-validating poetry which does indeed eclipse the policies and purposes of Caesar. (there are some recent readings which see Antony and Cleopatra as failed politicians who turn to aesthetics to gloss over their mistakes and cheer themselves up with poetry. I can imagine such a play, but this one is not it.) Cleopatra was ‘confined’ in her monument, a prisoner of Caesar’s force – apparently secure within the boundaries of his soldiers and his ‘scroll.’ It is by the unforgettable excess and bounty/beauty of her last ‘Act’ that she triumphs over all that would confine her, and turns death into ‘play,’ the play that will take her into Eternity.

Let me return to the opposition between feast and waste. Feast derives from festa – holiday – and in one sense, Antony and Cleopatra turn life in Egypt into a perpetual holiday. ‘Waste’ is more interesting. Just as ‘dirt’ has been defined as ‘matter out of place,’ so the idea of ‘waste’ presupposes a boundary or classification mark which enables one to draw a distinction between what is necessary, valuable, useable in some way, and what lies outside these categories – ‘waste.’ Antony, we may say, recognizes no such boundary. Indeed, he ‘wastes’ himself, in the sense that he is endlessly prodigal of all he has and does not count the cost. From Antony’s point of view, all life in Egypt can be seen as a feast; in Caesar’s eyes – the Roman perspective – it is all ‘waste.’ From the etymology of the word (uacare, to be empty or vacant, uanus, hollow, vain; uastus, desolated, desert, vast; up to Old English weste – see Eric Partridge’s Origins), we can say that there is a connection between vastness, vacancy, vanity, and waste. Antony is inhabiting a realm of vastness, vanity, vacancy – the ‘great gap’ named by Cleopatra (Caesar, indeed, refers to Antony’s ‘vacancy’). From Caesar’s point of view, and those who see with the Roman eye, Antony is indeed ‘empty’ while Caesar is referred to as ‘the fullest man.’ Thus Enobarbus, commenting on Antony’s challenge to Caesar to meet him in single battle: ‘that he should dream,/Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will/Answer his emptiness!’ Caesar is, from one point of view, full – full of history, of Fortune, of time. Antony is ‘empty’ – committed to vacancy, vanity, waste. The question implicitly posed is whether he and Cleopatra, and their way of life, are not ‘full’ of something quite outside of Caesar’s discourse and his measurements, something which makes him the empty man. Caesar is full of politics, empty of poetry; Antony and Cleopatra reach a point where they are empty of politics, but full of poetry. Which is the real ‘vacancy’? It depends where you are standing, how you are looking. But there is nothing ‘vast’ about Caesar: even if he conquers the whole world, everything is done with ‘measure’ and ‘temper’ (temperance). If Antony and Cleopatra melt and dissolve, it is into a ‘vastness’ which is the necessary space for their exceeding, their excess – ‘beyond the size of dreaming.’ In this play, Shakespeare compels a complete revaluation of ‘waste.’ Historically, it was not paltry to be Caesar, certainly not this Caesar, who is insured of, and will ensure, a ‘temperate’ imperial future, during which time Christ would be born. This Caesar certainly has his place in the story of history. But in this play, his conquest is registered as a gradual diminishment as he – alphabetically – takes over the orient, but in doing so merely imposes Roman ‘prescription’ on a vast world of pagan fecundity, spilled plenty, and an oriental magnificence which transforms ‘waste’ into ‘bounty,’ and makes Caesar seem like the ‘merchant’ he is, a calculating Machiavel – an ass unpolicied.

Boundaries are, of course, of central importance for civilization. For Vico, in The New Science, civilized man is precisely one who creates and guards ‘confines’ – ‘for it was necessary to set up boundaries to the field in order to put a stop to the infamous promiscuity of things in the bestial state. On these boundaries were to be fixed the confines first of families, then of gentes or houses, later of peoples, and finally of nations.’ There is much in Shakespeare which honors and defends the importance of recognizing the need for boundaries. But in this play, writing against the recorded, inexorable grain and movement of history, Shakespeare makes us re-value what might have been lost in the triumph of Caesar:

    O, see, my women,

The crown o’ th’ earth doth melt. My lord!

O, withered is the garland of the war,

The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls

Are level now with men. The odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

(IV.xv.62-8)

This is ‘waste’? Rather, the fecundity, plentitude and bounty associated with Egypt, and Antony in Egypt, have fed into and nourished Cleopatra’s speech, until she is speaking a kind of language of pure poetry about which alphabetic man can have nothing to say. The whole pagan age is over; the future belongs to Caesar – and Christ. But confronted with this kind of transcendental poetry, which is indeed all ‘excess,’ that future seems merely trivial, temporal, temperate. ‘The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom,’ wrote Blake. In this play, the poetry of excess leads to the unbounded, unboundaries, spaces of infinity. Saving leads to earthly empire; squandering opens an avenue to Eternity. All air and fire – and poetry. Bounty overplus.”

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From Frank Kermode:

“There is a contrast with Caesar’s expressions of regret [regarding Antony’s death] that follow shortly. He undercuts Cleopatra’s extravagances by saying that the death of Antony should have been more portentous: ‘The round world/Should have shook lions into civil streets…The death of Antony/Is not a single doom, in the name lay/A moi’ty of the world’ (V.i.15-19). His Antony was not the whole world, only half of it; his portent signify not universal collapse but a temporary interference with the civic peace of Rome and his own imperial progress The eulogy is forma., but always attentive to the importance of victorious Caesar: ‘we could not stall together/In the whole world…my mate in empire’ (39-43). He breaks off his tribute at the call of business: ‘Hear me, good friends – but I will tell you at some meter season’ (48-49). And he plans to lead Cleopatra in his triumph.

She, however, has seen how she must triumph over Caesar: ‘Tis paltry to be Caesar;/Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,/A minister of her will’ (V.ii.2-4). She has it in her power to do the deed ‘Which shackles accidents and bolts up change’ (6) – a wonderfully vigorous line, imprisoning chance and forcing change into a cell like a despised convict. To Caesar’s messenger she is crafty enough to say she is ‘his fortune’s vassal’ (29). Seized by Romans, she tells Dolabella her dream of the Emperor, the universal hero, the god. It has been suggested that the imagery derives from the Book of Revelation and from a mythographer’s description of the god Jupiter. This is plausible, and the passage is like the vision of a god or an angel:

His face was as the heav’ns, and therein stuck

A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted

The little O, th’ earth.

…

His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear’d arm

Created the world, his voice was propertied

As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t; an autumn it was

That grew the more by reaping. His delights

Were dolphin-like, they show’d his back above

The element they liv’d in. In his livery

Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were

As plates dropp’d from his pocket.

(V.ii.79-92)

This colossal figure is credited with power over the world and then over the universe; his very voice expressed the harmony of the spheres, inaccessible to mortal ears. The rapid switch from the seasonal imagery to that of the dolphin leaping out of the sea is again typical of Shakespeare’s late style – no laborious working out of the figures, instead a sort of impatience at the unexplored resources of language. Then another move, to kings and princes as servants wearing his livery, and finally a cosmic image of liberality, ‘realms and islands’ carelessly dropped, like coins from his pocket. Cleopatra defends herself against Dolabella’s gentle skepticism: this was not a mere dream; it is true that fancy or imagination produces in dreams stranger stuff than nature can contrive, but in this case we are talking about reality, about nature’s masterpiece, something real and actual, not the mere shadows produced by dreaming.

With the entry of the new, actual Emperor, she reallocates the title she conferred on Antony: ‘Sole sir o’ th’ world,’ she calls him (120), for all the world is now his (134). The episode of Seleucus and the inventory reminds us that Cleopatra has not lost her cunning. She is trying to trick Caesar into believing that her withholding of much property signifies her intention to live; and he wants her for his triumph. Cleopatra wins this bout. Her last hours have the kind of splendor she attributed to Antony. It is at this point that her women, Charmian and Iras, catch the tone of royal magniloquence: ‘Finish, good lady, the bright day is done,/And we are for the dark’ (193-94).

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From Van Doren:

“Cleopatra is too seldom at rest to be easily understood; we shall never be sure, any more than Antony would have been sure, what her intentions were with respect to the treasure she withheld from Caesar (V.ii.138-92), and whether her decision to die was inspired by loathing for Roman triumphs or by love for the ‘husband’ to whom death would bring her. When the basket of asps arrives she announces to her people:

My resolution’s plac’d, and I have nothing

Of woman in me; now from head to foot

I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon`         

No planet is of mine.

(V.ii.238-41)

Yet her demeanor in dying has no marble in it. She is still all mercury and lightness, all silk and down. ‘I have immortal longings in me,’ is said with a smile at the expense of the rural fellow who has just gone out wishing her joy of the worm and insisting that its bite is ‘immortal’; she must have on her robe and crown before she feels the loving pinch of death; when Iras precedes her in death she pretends to worry lest Antony’s first kiss in heaven be wasted on another woman; she saves enough breath to call Caesar ‘ass unpolicied,’ and spends the last of it in likening the immortal worm to a baby at her breast. Charmian, surviving her a moment, echoes ‘ass unpolicied’ with ‘lass unparallell’d,’ and bothers to straighten her mistress’s crown before she dies. The scene is great and final, yet nothing in it seems to be serious; and the conversation between Caesar and his train when they come in concerns a spectacle that is pretty rather than painful.

     She looks like sleep,

As she would catch another Antony

In her strong toil of grace.

The strength of Cleopatra has never appeared more clearly than in the charm with which she yields herself to death. Her greatness cannot be distinguished from her littleness, as water may not be defined in water.”

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And from Paglia:

“Did Shakespeare base Cleopatra on an Italian model? A.L. Rowse thinks the Dark Lady of the sonnets was the half-Italian Emilia Bassanio. Luigi Barzini describes ‘the importance of spectacle’ in Italian culture, with its public staging of emotional scenes. He speaks of ‘the transparency of Italian faces,’ which allows conversations to be followed at a distance: ‘Undisguised emotions, some sincere and some feigned, follow each other on an Italian’s face as swiftly as the shadows of clouds over a meadow on a windy day in spring.’ Shakespeare’s self-dramatizing Cleopatra has a fluid Italian expressiveness. In her amoral dissimulations, she confirms the negative Northern European view of Italian and papist character in the Renaissance. Renaissance England was more flamboyant than modern England but less so than Renaissance Italy. Hence in the spiritual geography of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt is to Rome as Renaissance Italy was to Renaissance England. Cleopatra belongs to an emotional and sexual southland. But Shakespeare is well aware of the anarchic danger in a life of impersonations. Caesar wins in Antony and Cleopatra because he represents political order, the dream of the fractured, fractious Renaissance. Antony and Cleopatra’s reactionary political premise is borne out by Italian history, where theatrical individualism weakened centralize authority, aiding the rise of the tribal Mafia. Since World War II, nearly fifty governments have come and gone in Rome. Restless change is the rule.

We turn now to the ultimate question of Shakespeare’s play. If Cleopatra contains all emotional modes and all powers of male and female, why is she defeated by the world? Why is she not a perfected image of man? Cleopatra dies, while Rosalind triumphantly survives, because Cleopatra is an incomplete Mercurius and as such cannot advance her play toward the goal of English Renaissance art; social and hierarchal consolidation. An important image pattern in Antony and Cleopatra has attracted little or no comment. Astrology, even more than alchemy, was one of the great symbols of the Renaissance. Its iconography pervaded Renaissance art, book illustration, and interior décor. The formidable combined forces of Judeo-Christianity and modern science have never succeeded in wiping out pagan astrology, nor will they ever. Astrology supplies what is missing in the west’s official moral and intellectual codes. Astrology is the oldest organized art form of sexual personae. Waging war on astrology, the medieval and Renaissance Church promulgated the distortion that astrology is fatalism, a flouting of God’s Providence and the necessity for moral struggle. But the predictive part of astrology is less important than its psychology, which three thousand years of continuous practice have given a phenomenal subtlety. Astrology does insist upon self-discipline and self-transformation. Judging astrology by those vague sun-sign columns in the daily paper is like judging Christianity by a smudged shop window of black-velvet-day-glo paintings of the Good Shepherd. The idea that the stars literally influence man (by a falling fluid, an influenza), is plainly untenable. But that the movements of all the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measure is less easy to dismiss. I subscribe to what Jung calls synchronicity. Things happen in complex patterns of apparent coincidence, noticed by the keen eyes of the artist. Astrology links man to nature, its major point of departure from Judeo-Christianity. The Greek word zodiac means circle of animals. Most birth signs are symbolized by animals, whose character astrology identifies with human types. Our behaviorist age is generally resistant to the idea of genetic traits, for individuals, sexes, or races. But ask any mother of a large family whether personality is innate or learned. She senses a child’s inborn shyness or aggression from earliest infancy. People who dismiss astrology do so out of either ignorance or rationalism. Rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts. Interpretation of poem, dream, or person requires intuitions and divination, not science.

The Renaissance embraced astrology as part of its infatuation with sexual personae. Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s greatest drama of sexual personae, makes astrological metaphors crucial to its psychological design. Each sign of the zodiac is associated with one of the four elements, named by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. From long study, I summarize the astrological meaning of the elements as follows. Fire is will, originality, boldness, the amoral life force. Air is language, wit, balance, humane perspective. Water is intuition, sympathy, deep feeling, mystical oneness, and prophecy. Earth is order, method, precision, realism, materialism. Modern science discarded the four elements in favor of finer terminology. From the late Renaissance on, more and more basic elements were discovered, now approaching one hundred. John Antony West claims, however, that the four principal elements of modern organic chemistry, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, closely correspond in function to fire, earth, air, and water. Northrop Frye says, ‘Earth, air, water, and fire are still the four elements of imaginative experience, and always will be.’ A person’s natal horoscope sometimes lacks one of the four elements, a disturbing balance which can and should be compensated for through self-analysis and vigilant effort. My theory is that Shakespeare has cast for Cleopatra a horoscope lacking the element of earth and that this psychic incompletion, with her refusal to correct it, dooms both herself and Antony.

The most poetic speech in the play, by normally curt Enobarbus, is a gorgeous dreamlike memory of Cleopatra’s arrival at Tarsus to meet Antony: ‘The barge she sat it, like a burnished throne,/Burned on the water.’ Cleopatra is Venus in motion, a Dionysian epiphany. Shakespeare is answering the frozen iconic entrance of Spenser’s Belphoebe, the Apollonian Diana. With its gold deck and purple sails, the barge is the Amazon sanctuary of Phoenician Dido, whom Virgil decks with red and gold. Cleopatra carries her own bower with her, getting it out of the swampy Spenserian glade onto the brisk high seas. Shakespeare’s motion picture has its own soundtrack, flute music and exudes a ‘strange invisible perfume.’ A magnetism or suction pulls people out of the marketplace toward the wharves. Cleopatra as Venus is the power of physical attraction among the elements, which Empedocles attributes to Aphrodite. She is in heat: Shakespeare carefully adds fire to his tableau. That the barge ‘burns’ is his addition to Plutarch’s description. Cleopatra is Venus born from the sea. In Enobarbus’ speech, she commands three elements: water, air, and fire. Earth is pointedly excluded. In fact, earth is evacuated, denuded of its properties by the rush of citizens shoreward. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is the free play of sovereign imagination, hostile to the steadfastness and stability of earth.

The climax of Antony and Cleopatra is the battle of Actium, a turning point in western history. Antony’s loss is Caesar’s gain and the beginning of Roman empire, united under one man. Shakespeare stunningly mythologizes Plutarch’s account, without loss of factual accuracy. He introduces elemental metaphors effecting a poetic transformation of history. Antony’s fateful decision to fight by sea ruins him. Commander of infantrymen and master of land warfare, he foolishly allows Cleopatra to dictate his battle plan. The Egyptians are seafarers. Cleopatra insists the ultimate contest with Caesar be by navy, not army. Antony’s seasoned soldiers passionately appeal to him, but blinded by love, he waves them away. In agreeing to fight by sea, Antony repudiates the element of earth, the foundation of his illustrious career. At the same time, he shrugs off common sense and practicality, qualities astrologically symbolized by earth. In imposing the element of water upon her lover, Cleopatra destroys him. Shakespeare weaves the elemental imagery into the play from the start, so that the words ‘land’ and ‘sea’ chime ominously in the deliberations at Actium.

The scene where Antony blithely severs his connection with earth ends with the naming of Caesar’s lieutenant, Taurus. The next scene, just a few lines long, begins with Caesar calling out to Taurus, who answers and departs, his sole appearance in the play. Shakespeare has plucked this name from Plutarch’s roster of military officers at Actium. A Renaissance audience, familiar with simple astrology, would immediately recognize that Taurus is the first of the three earth signs of the zodiac. Taurus was also Shakespeare’s birth sign. This is what Maynard Mack would call the ‘emblematic entrance and exit’ in Shakespeare’s plays. Caesar’s deputy is an earth-spirit because Antony and Cleopatra identifies Caesar with the astrological qualities of earth – patience, pragmatism, emotional reserve, discipline, application. Caesar is the reality principle, Realpolitik. He represents what Antony and Cleopatra have rejected, and because drama must take place in human space and human time, he defeats them. Psychic fixity overcomes psychic volatility. The historical Caesar was himself ruled by an earth sign. Suetonius reports that August Caesar commemorated an astrological prediction of his rise to power by ordering struck ‘a silver coin stamped with Capricorn, the sign under which he had been born.’ In Antony and Cleopatra Caesar consolidates his Capricornian earth-power by binding Taurus to him, taking away the heart of Antony’s military identity.

Ancient and modern historians have been puzzled by Cleopatra’s sudden flight from the battle of Actium, and even more by Antony’s shameful abandonment of his troops and ships to follow her. As Shakespeare presents it, Cleopatra and the Antony whom she has infected veer off from the theater of war because of a lack of the tenacity and resolution that earth contributes to a horoscope. Cleopatra is the ‘fire and air’ of imagination afloat upon the sea of perpetual transformations. Fire is her fierce or fiery character of aggression and violence. Air is her verbal energy and poetic power of image-making. Water is her uncontainable surges of emotion and her mercurial shifts of mood. Cleopatra’s personae are in constant, uncontrollable change because earth is not present to stabilize or set a single persona. The sea she chooses at Actium is Dionysian ‘liquid nature,’ a phrase from elsewhere in Plutarch. This is the watery chthonian which separates her from Rosalind.

Cleopatra is Egypt, and Egypt is the Nile. In the Renaissance way, Cleopatra is addressed by the name of her realm, even by Antony. In Antony and Cleopatra, dry Egyptian earth has no inherent value. Fertility comes only when earth is subdued by water, turned to ‘slime and ooze’ by the flooding Nile. This muck is the primal swamp of Dionysian metamorphosis. The Egyptian serpent (already identified with Cleopatra) is bred from mud by the fiery sun. Cleopatra as Isis is Great Mother to her people. But Antony, in entering the humid Bower of Bliss of her liquid realm, loses his sense of self. He is not just a private person but a leader upon whom thousands depend. A leader cannot live by love alone. Antony betrays his men, and he betrays himself. The lovers’ indifference to public concerns and their exaltation of emotion over duty are prefigured from the start in metaphors which inundate land with water. Antony declares, ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/Of the ranged empire fall!’ – unadmirable sentiments for a Roman triumvir. Cleopatra angrily cries, ‘Sink Rome!’’ and ‘Melt Egypt into Nile!’. Antony and Cleopatra, obliterating earth in the waters of emotion, cannot resist the steady inexorable pressure of earth’s representative, Caesar.

The Renaissance Shakespeare knows Antony and Cleopatra are morally in the wrong, yet he projects into them the liquefied proteanism of his own artistic self. Antony, once the ‘pillar’ of the Roman world, sees himself turning into shifting clouds, shapes of horse, bear, lion, citadel, cliff, mountain. Cleopatra has dissolved and naturalized him. Jane Harrison says of the Greek Orphics, with their persistent cloud metaphors, ‘Their theogony, their cosmogony, is full of vague nature-impersonations, of air and ether and Erebos and chaos, and the whirlpool of things unborn.’ Orphism is anti-Olympian and hence anti-Apollonian. In Antony and Cleopatra, Apollonian Rome, with its statutory limits, sets up rational barriers to the chaotic flux of sensory experience. Antony is alchemized by Cleopatra, queen of Dionysian nature. He is hermaphroditized by his dissolution in watery Egypt. Mars drowns in Venus. At his darkest moment, Antony says to Cleopatra, ‘Love, I am full of lead.’ This is the play’s nadir, before the transformation begins into spiritual gold.

Magic and prophecies are efficacious throughout. After his death, Cleopatra sees Antony as the astrological cosmic man, his eyes the sun and moon. The hermaphrodite rebis of alchemy was often shown as a union of Sol and Luna, sun and moon. Both Antony and Cleopatra reach perfection in death. As the incomplete Mercurius, Cleopatra must achieve her magnum opus outside of life rather than in it. Before her suicide, she says, ‘Now from head to foot/I am marble-constant: now the fleeting moon/No planet is of mine.’ Cleopatra is renouncing what Shakespeare elsewhere calls ‘the wat’ry moon,’ the symbol of emotional volatility we found in As You Like It and Midsummer Night’s Dream. At last she acquires that stony fixity of will which the play ascribes to Roman personality. Her ceaseless transformations end in the immobility of death – immutable as the Philosopher’s Stone. Death is already in her lips when she says, ‘I am fire, and air; my other elements/I give to baser life.’ Actually, she has finally mastered her too-combustible fire and air and achieved a spiritual integration of all four elements. With the addition of ‘marble-constant’ earth,’ the coldness of death, Cleopatra is now the complete Mercurius, enshrined upon her altar-like bier. ‘Husband, I come, ‘she says to the dead Antony. The medieval alchemic process was called both marriage bed and funeral bier. Those who have sought a redemptive pattern in Antony and Cleopatra are correct, but Christian it is not. Shakespeare ends his play with the alchemic purification of pagan personality.

The symbolic marriage of Antony and Cleopatra, enacted at the moment of death, removes the lovers from the social order. Their hedonism and self-involvement have damaged their nations and their cause. Eight boars for breakfast is no recipe for political success. Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemies, a three-hundred-year-old Macedonian dynasty. After her death, Egypt was annexed as subject state to Rome and never regained its former glory. Antony and Cleopatra demonstrates that life cannot be lived as a series of perpetual self-transformations without violating social and ethical principles. My generation learned this the hard way, going down in sexual disease and drug overdoses. Antony and Cleopatra takes a double point of view. Shakespeare acknowledges the eternal authority of beauty and imagination, but he renders unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Social order and stability were primary English Renaissance values. This is why Rosalind, unlike Cleopatra, is the perfected Mercurius. At the end of her play, Rosalind demonstrates the subordination of personality to society by relinquishing her theatrical androgyny and metamorphoses for obedience in marriage. Hierarchy is restored, in home and palace.

If Rosalind is a role difficult to play, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is even more so. A bad Rosalind is simply simpering or flat. But a bad Cleopatra is ludicrous. No one fits the part –except Tina Turner, Kent Christiansen’s superb suggestion to me. In the video of ‘What’s Love Got To Do With it?’ Tina Turner is Shakespeare’s ‘tawny’ Cleopatra in all her moods, regal, raffish, masculine, maternal, strolling among her people in the city streets. Cleopatra’s fiery sexual expressionism is Shakespeare’s reply to the cool introversion of Spenser’s chaste heroines. Cleopatra is Amazon and mother but also chatterbox…Nothing in literature is more majestic than the sound of a true king speaking in Shakespeare. The enormous assertion of that voice and the internal stability in the verse are functions of Renaissance hierarchy, overflows of the great chain of being. Unfortunately, the heroic Shakespearean sound is muffled these days for scaled-down television performances or productions by liberal directors with antifascist axes to grind. But Shakespeare’s aristocratic voice must be heard. It is a moral ideal. Rosalind and Cleopatra…strain at the limits of the Renaissance hierarchic code. Shakespeare dramatizes the Renaissance tension between sexual personae and social order, one of his profoundest concerns. The major theme of Shakespeare’s plays is personality-in-history the heart of western identity.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-vCyk8IkAs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF-jXaEg2V8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHcnZ46FsSg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZA1uhjKDIc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu8KFlfzk3Y

My next posts:  Sunday evening/Monday morning, final thoughts on Antony and Cleopatra, Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning, Sonnet #140, and then Thursday evening/Friday morning my introduction to our next play, Shakespeare’s highly experimental and most political play, the rather startling Coriolanus.  (OOPS — my correction, our next play is Pericles — THEN Coriolanus.

Coriolanus

An Introduction

By Dennis Abrams

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Shakespeare’s final tragedy, Coriolanus is said to be his purest expression of classical tragic form, whereby a hero meets a sudden (and brutal) reversal of fate.  It seems likely that while researching his earlier Roman tragedies Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra (relying heavily on Plutarch of course), Shakespeare’s eye was caught by the story of the glittering yet ultimately catastrophic career of one Caius Martius Coriolanus, a Roman general whose brilliance on the battlefield was matched only by his failings as a politician.  The story, like many of Shakespeare’s later plays, is a fable no matter how you look at it, but a fable with potentially different readings:  in one, Coriolanus is a tragic hero deserted by a fickle populace; in another, he is a villain whose arrogance threatened dictatorship. As usual, Shakespeare makes room for both of positions and more besides, using the politics of his own day to press home to audiences and readers still pressing questions about how democracy should operate.  (John F. Kennedy was, according to Gore Vidal, fascinated by the play.)  During its performance history, Coriolanus has been interpreted, on one hand, as propaganda for Hitler and his Third Reich, and on the other, as a communist manifesto enshrining the power of the masses. As the soldier Aufidus, watching Coriolanus’ star on the decline, notes, “our virtues/Lie in the’ interpretation of the time’ (4.7.49-50)

DATE

Uncertain, although the language (and subject matter) put it close to Antony and Cleopatra (along with Pericles and Timon of Athens) in 1608-1609, and there are allusions within the play to historical events such as the Midlands food riots and the “great frost” of 1607-08, which seems to support this.  Regardless, it is the last of the tragedies, and perhaps the first of Shakespeare’s plays intended for indoor performance at the Blackfriars theatre.

SOURCES

As with the other Roman plays, North’s 1595 edition of Plutarch’s Lives is the central source, and as was also the case with Antony and Cleopatra, some passages are lifted almost word for word.

TEXTS

The 1623 Folio is the sole authoritative text, probably set directly from a transcript of Shakespeare’s foul papers.

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From Harold Bloom:

‘The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of necessity. The tame submission to usurped authority or even the natural resistance to it, has nothing to excite or flatter the imagination: it is the assumption of a right to insult or oppress others that carries an imposing air of superiority with it. We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance, has more attraction than abstract right. Coriolanus complains of the fickleness of the people: yet, the instant he cannot gratify his pride and obstinacy at their expense, he turns his arms against his country.’  — William Hazlitt

“Coriolanus, more even than Julius Caesar and Henry V, is Shakespeare’s political play. That interests me less than its experimental nature, since it appears to be a deliberate departure from the modes of the five high tragedies: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), Macbeth (1606), and Antony and Cleopatra (1606). Shakespeare turned forty after having written the last of those three plays in just over a year. Coriolanus (1607) has as its protagonist a battering ram of a soldier, literally a one-man army, the greatest killing machine in all of Shakespeare. That Coriolanus is not totally unsympathetic (whatever one’s politics) is a Shakespearean triumph, since of all major figures in the plays, this one has the most limited consciousness.

Notoriously the victim of his dominating and devouring mother, Coriolanus is an overgrown child. Anywhere except upon a battlefield he is, at best, a disaster waiting to happen. Confronting the mob of Roman plebeians, he is guaranteed to insult them into an absolute fury. Shakespeare, as Anne Barton brilliantly demonstrates, is careful to distinguish the Roman commoners of Coriolanus with the crowds in Julius Caesar or the followers of Jack Cade in Henry VI. Barton says of the plebeians in Coriolanus: ‘They care about motivation, their own and that of their oppressors, and they are by no means imperceptive.’ They are not a rabblement, and Shakespeare does not take sides against them. Caius Martius (to give Coriolanus his actual name) would be better suited as a general of the Volscians, Rome’s war-like enemies, then he is as a Roman leader, an irony that Shakespeare enforces throughout. From Caius Martius’s perspective, the common people of Rome deserve neither bread nor circuses. In their view, he is a menace to their survival. Shakespeare, as Hazlitt would not admit, allows some justice to the people’s side of this clash. They are fearful and irascible, but Caius Martius is dangerously provocative, the common people of Rome deserve neither bread nor circuses. In their view, he is a menace to their survival. They are fearful and irascible, but Caius Martius is dangerously provocative, and they are more right than not to banish him. His worship of ‘honor’ grants no value whatsoever to their lives. Still, he is more his own enemy than he is theirs, and his tragedy is not the consequence of their fear and anger, but of his own nature and nurture.

As noted before, in fourteen consecutive months, Shakespeare had created Lear and the Fool, Edgar and Edmund, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Compared with that eightfold, in personality or in character Caius Martius scarcely exists. Had Shakespeare wearied of the labor of reinventing the human, at least in the tragic mode? There is little inwardness in Caius Martius, and what may be there is accessible neither to us or to anyone in the play, including Caius Martius himself. What, then, was Shakespeare attempting to do for himself, as a dramatist, by composing Coriolanus? Norman Rabkin, in a lucid interpretation of the play, sees Martius as essentially congruous with prior tragic protagonists:

‘In accepting the name Coriolanus, Martius accepts public recognition for what he has done, and necessarily compromises himself. Like Lear, Macbeth, Brutus, and Hamlet, Coriolanus makes us realize here how much the hero is created by what he has accomplished, defined by the events through which he has passed.’

But are Lear and Macbeth, Brutus and Hamlet, so created and defined? There is a substance in them that prevails; in contrast, Coriolanus is quite empty. Lear’s passion, Macbeth’s imagination, Brutus’s nobility, Hamlet’s infinite consciousness precede accomplishments and outlast events. We cannot envision Coriolanus in any contexts or circumstances other than his own, and yet he cannot survive his context or his circumstance. That precisely is his tragedy, and that, rather than politics, is Shakespeare’s principal concern in this play. To invoke again Chesterton’s phrase that always haunts me, Shakespeare’s most vital protagonists are ‘great spirits in chains.’

Coriolanus is in chains, because of his nature and his situation, yet he is anything but a great spirit. Raised by his mother to be an infant Mars, he always remains just that, despite his ceaseless drive toward autonomy. When the crowd banishes him, he defies them in his most memorable speech:

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!

Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!

Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,

Fan you into despair! Have the power still

To banish your defenders, till at length

Your ignorance – which finds not till it feels,

Making but reservation of yourselves,

Still your own foes – deliver you as most

Abated captives to some nation

That won you without blows! Despising

For you the city, thus I turn my back.

There is a world elsewhere!

(III.iii.120-35)

Out of context, this is magnificent; within the play, it may be more pathetic than heroic. Coriolanus should indeed have gone into exile; he might then have matured in ‘a world elsewhere.’ Instead, as Hazlitt noted, with grim satisfaction, Coriolanus goes to the Volscians, and leads them against Rome, hardly an honorable enterprise, unless ‘honor’ means only the battle prowess of the individual, whatever his cause. Anne Barton almost uniquely maintains that Coriolanus does find a home among the Volscians, because they are more archaic than the Romans and universally worship war. I find this puzzling, since the play’s pragmatic point is that Coriolanus ends homeless: he cannot bear to return to Rome, and he cannot stay in the service of the Volscians. Barton’s contention is that Coriolanus has learned the truth that the commons have rights also, but dies before he can ‘rebuild his life.’ Hazlitt seems to me closer to the play’s realities when he observes that Coriolanus lives and dies in ‘the insolence of power.’ The tragedy of Coriolanus is that there is absolutely no place for him in the world of the commonal and the communal, whether among Volscians or Romans. But why Shakespeare chose to write so curious a tragedy is still the question I wish to address.”

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But if Bloom is not particularly interested in the play’s political aspects, for Jan Kott, it’s all political:

“Among all great Shakespearean plays, Coriolanus has been one of the last frequently performed. The play has had few enthusiasts and admirers, although among their numbers were such personalities as Coleridge, Swinburne, Brecht and Leon Schiller. But most people were discouraged, revolted or – at best – unmoved by it. The play was not a success in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and in the three centuries that followed; nor is it our times. It has been called a bleak tragedy, or a monodrama. In Coriolanus there is no enchanting poetry, no music of the spheres; there are no great lovers, or superb clowns; no raging elements, or monsters conceived in imagination but more real than actual experience itself. There is only an historical chronicle, dry as a bone, though violently dramatized. There is also a monumentalized hero, who can rouse all sorts of emotions, but never sympathy.

However, Coriolanus is not really a monodrama. In fact, the tragedy has two protagonists, although one them has many heads and many names. I would not point him out at once, but rather begin with the assertion that Coriolanus is never alone. At least, in the physical or dramatic sense. In twenty-five scenes of the play, out of twenty-nine, crowds are present. Twelve scenes take place in the streets of Rome, in the Forum, and on the Capitol; two scenes at Corioli, ten on fields of battle and in military camps. The crowd is nameless rather than having many names. Characters are called: First Citizen, Second Citizen, Third Citizen; First Senator, Second Senator; First Sentinel, Second Sentinel; First Officer, Second Officer; First Conspirator, Second Conspirator. Characters of military and political leaders are only very broadly outlined. They emerge for a moment from the crowd and are lost in it again. There are also Coriolanus’ mother, wife and son. But even they do not have a life of their own and simply serve as background to the situations in which the tragedy will be developed.

No doubt the dryness of Coriolanus must have had a discouraging effect on readers and audiences. The play is, indeed, harsh and austere. But the austerity of dramatic matter does not sufficiently explain the dislike almost universally felt for so long for one of Shakespeare’s most profound works. In my view, the reasons for this dislike must be looked for elsewhere. It resulted from the ambiguity of Coriolanus – political, moral, and, in the last resort, philosophical. It was the sort of ambiguity difficult to swallow.

Coriolanus, as written by Shakespeare, could not wholly satisfy either aristocrats, or republicans; friends of the people, or their enemies. The play annoyed those who believed in the masses, and those who despised them; those who recognized the purpose and didactics of history, and those who laughed at it; those who saw mankind as a mound of termites, and those who saw only lone individual termites painfully experiencing the tragedy of existence. Coriolanus did not fit in with any historical or philosophical conception current in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries.

Coriolanus could not please either classicists or romanticists. To the former it seemed incoherent, vulgar and brutal; to the latter it was too bitter, flat and dry. The case of Troilus and Cressida repeated itself here: that was another Shakespearean play suffering from misapprehension; a play, whose philosophical essence, in spite of all the apparent differences, is very much akin to Coriolanus. In both plays ideas are violently and ironically contrasted with practice; this does not, however, result in recognizing praxis as the final and only standard of value.

Coriolanus is only seemingly a monodrama, or a tragedy on an ancient theme. No doubt the play could be considered in terms of polis or urbs – a city state-protagonist, fate. The hero breaks moral law, the city is threatened with destruction. The hero must choose between his life and the city. He chooses death. The city has been saved and erects a temple to Fortune. Rome is the city, Coriolanus the hero. But fate, as visualized by Shakespeare, although it pursues, corners and breaks the hero in the mode of Greek furies, has a modern aspect. Fate is represented here by class struggle. But it is a Rome of plebeians and patricians.

The action of Coriolanus takes place after the expulsion of kings in the half-legendary times of the early Roman Republic. The story is briefly described by Livy, and Plutarch gives a detailed account of it in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The English version by Sir Thomas North was published in 1579. It was from this translation that Shakespeare took the plot, characters and outline of events.

Rome has been engaged in warfare with neighboring peoples. In  Rome itself a struggle of the poor against the rich is going on. Plutarch has this to say about it:

‘The Senate did favour the rich against the people, who did complain of the sore oppression of usurers, of whom they borrowed money. For those that had little, were yet spoiled of that little they had by their creditors, for lack of ability to pay the usury: who offered their goods to be sold to them would give most. And such as had nothing left, their bodies were laid hold on, and they were made their bondsmen…The Senate would give no care to them, but made as though they had forgotten their former promise, and suffered them to be made slaves and bondmen to their creditors, and besides, to be turned out all that ever they had: they fell then even to flat rebellion and mutiny, and to stir up dangerous tumults within the city.’

Wars had made the patricians rich. They have gained land and slaves. But they cannot carry on war without the plebeians. Plebeians have gained the right to elect their tribunes and to participate in government. The bravest of the Romans is Caius Martius of an old patrician family. Having captured the town of Corioli from the mountainous people of the Volscians he has been given the name Coriolanus. He has rendered Rome meritorious services. He is a great general, and on his body there are twenty-seven scars from wounds inflicted by the enemy. The patricians nominate Coriolanus for the office of Consul. The nomination has to be approved by the people. Coriolanus is an aristocrat, hates the people and is hated by them. There is famine in Rome. Coriolanus objects to the distribution of grain, unless the plebeians renounce their right to elect tribunes. The angry people refuse to approve Coriolanus’ appointment to the consulate. The tribunes accuse him of plotting against the republic. Coriolanus has to stand trial. The people force the patricians to banish Coriolanus from Rome forever. Coriolanus now dreams of revenge. He goes to the Volscians and proposes to his recent enemies an expedition against Rome. He assumes command of it himself.

This is the first chapter of the Roman legend of Coriolanus. There is a republican moral in it. A leader who despises the people betrays the country and goes over to the enemy. An ambitious general aiming at dictatorial power is extremely dangerous for the republic. The people have been right to exile Coriolanus. But now the second chapter begins. Coriolanus, at the head of the Volscian army, approaches the gates of Rome. The city has no military leader, is defenseless and doomed to destruction. Plebeians and patricians accuse each other of having driven out Coriolanus. They try to appease him, beg for mercy. All in vain. The Romans then send Coriolanus’ wife and mother as envoys. Coriolanus agrees to conclude peace, and retreats with the enemy army from the gates of Rome.

There are two endings to the story. The first, quoted by Livy, is sentimental and idyllic. Grateful Romans erect a temple in honor of Coriolanus’ wife and mother, while he himself returns to the Volscians and dies peacefully after a long life. The other ending is far more dramatic. Coriolanus knows that by retreating from Rome he has condemned himself to death. Breaking his contract with the Volscians he has betrayed for the second time. And he is murdered by them as a traitor.

The latter ending is quoted by Plutarch. But the author of Lives does not seem to be at all aware of the fact that Coriolanus’ history contains two morals, contradictory to each other. The moral drawn from the second chapter is very bitter, indeed. The city that exiles its leader becomes defenseless. The people can only hate and bit, but are unable to defend their city. The masses are an element as blind and destructive as fire or flood. Among this multi-headed and just nameless crowd, only Coriolanus was a great man. The country showed itself ungrateful to him. It could not contain him. He was a born ruler. History is cruel and abounds in traps. The great ones fall, the little ones remain.

Plutarch did not see either the tragedy of Coriolanus, or the tragedy inherent in history. In his Lives he set the Greek ethical ideal of harmonious personality against the Roman virtus. The moral drawn from Coriolanus’ biography, as narrated by him, was psychological and empirical:

‘A rare and excellent wit untaught, doth bring forth many good and evil things together, as a fat soil that lieth unmanured bringeth forth herbs and weeds…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…his behavior was so unpleasant to them by reason of a certain insolent and stern manner he had, which because it was too lordly, was disliked. And to say truly, the greatest benefit that learning bringeth unto men, is this: that it teacheth men that be rude and rough of nature, by compass and rule of reason, to be civil and courteous, and to like better, the mean state than the higher.’

So much for good Plutarch. Coriolanus’ history is virulent, indeed. But it was Shakespeare who first saw the virulence in it. He must have been particularly struck by it, since he made it the main theme of the drama. In the Histories and Tragedies – the latter being more condensed than the former – Shakespeare shows feudal history, its bare and unalterable mechanism, in an absolute form. History is being performed on the apex of social hierarchy. It is personal, uses names, though the names are few. Only occasionally frightened townsmen appear. They learn about the sovereign’s death, a war, or a coup d’etat. They view every change of king as an elemental disaster. History takes place above them, but it is they who have to pay for it.

Feudal history could easily find its model and reflection in the story of Roman emperors. Comparisons between Caesar and Brutus were a frequent theme of Renaissance moralizing; stories of tyrants were a favorite plot of pre-Shakespearean and Elizabethan tragedy. Tacitus and Suetonius were quoted more frequently than other Roman authors. Busts of the twelve Caesars decorated the palaces of all Christian kings. Republican Rome was far more remote and less familiar to the Renaissance. The only comparable contemporary institution was the Venetian Republic, but even it was governed by the Doge and aristocracy. People of the Renaissance were fascinated by the problem of absolute power; the mechanism by means of which a good prince is transformed into a tyrant. To them it was an everyday affair. It was one of the great Shakespearean themes. But not the only one.

Shakespeare was a far greater innovator in Julius Caesar and in Coriolanus than in Antony and Cleopatra. In the first two plays he introduced into tragedy republican Rome. No doubt he looked at it through the experiences of late Renaissance and searched for the confirmation of his bitter, most pessimistic and cruel philosophy of history. But the matter he used was different somehow and could not be contained in the unchanging circle where the beginning and end of every reign was marked by sufferings of the fallen monarch. The metaphor of the grand staircase, climbed by every ruler in turn, with the scaffold at the first and the last step, could not be applied to this view of history any more.

Coriolanus still has a mark of grim greatness and is crushed by history. But the history that breaks Coriolanus is not royal history any more. It is the history of a city divided into plebeians and patricians. It is the history of class struggle. History in the royal chronicles, and in Macbeth, was a Grand Mechanism, which had something demonic in it. History in Coriolanus has ceased to be demonic. It is only ironic and tragic. This is another reason why Coriolanus is a modern play.”

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And finally, from Garber:

“The play is set in the early years of Rome, and a modern audience will experience The Tragedy of Coriolanus with the triple perspective it has learned to except from Shakespeare’s account of history: the play’s events and characters intersect with (1) the context of Roman history, and of the play’s source in Plutarch’s Lives, the time of the dramatic action: (2) the events and historical figures of Shakespeare’s day, the time of the play’s composition; and (3) the present – always shifting – historical moment, the time of the current staging or reading. The interplay among these various levels can produce some of the most effective, and most poignant, moments in a production. Like all Shakespearean plays, Coriolanus tells several different kinds of stories at once, depending upon which set of characters and issues is placed in the foreground. In this play the various levels are exceptionally clear, and exceptionally evenhanded, which is one reason why the play has been so successfully staged and appropriated across the political spectrum.

One reading might concentrate on Coriolanus, or Caius Martius, himself, the lone aristocrat, the heroic individual; another might take up the narrative of the common people, the hungry, disempowered ‘voices’; a third might emphasize the roles of the women in the play, or the family group constellated by the three ‘V’s’ (the mother Volumnia, the wife Virgilia, the friend Valeria) and the boy Young Martius, Coriolanus’ son. If, for example, we emphasize the character of Coriolanus, we might produce a reading about the nobility of tragedy, about the Aristotelian pattern of the rise and fall of a great men, and, coincidentally but not accidentally, about the upholding of Roman ideals, and the self-made man who is author of himself and of his tragedy. T.S. Eliot regarded Coriolanus as Shakespeare’s ‘most assured’ dramatic success, and a chancellor of England praised the hero’s ‘Tory virtues.’ A focus on the common people (plebeians, citizens), on the other hand, would draw attention to issues of class and politics, and to the material need for corn (grain) and for power. Although the general Cominius is the one who says ‘I shall lack voice,’ it is actually the people who do so, despite the fact that they are referred to metonymically as ‘voices’ throughout. Bertolt Brecht admired Coriolanus from a political perspective far removed from that of T.S. Eliot (or Edmund Burke, who also cited Shakespeare’s hero with approval). Brecht’s adaptation stressed the historical and economic location of the play, situated between feudalism and nascent capitalism. Similarly, a close examination of the place of women in the play, or a production that placed the issue at its center, would raise questions not only of social roles and marginalization but also of psychology and psychoanalysis. Volumnia has refused to ever treat her son like a child, sending him out to war at an early age, and she emphasizes her own values of manhood; he reacts by seeking her approval, overestimating her power, and both anxiously courting her favor and curtly rejecting it. The extended childhood in which this grown man finds himself will culminate in his exposure as a ‘boy’ and his subsequent downfall.

Thus Aristotelian tragic readings, class and materialist analyses, and psychoanalytic interpretations – to give just a few examples out of a host of possibilities – can readily coexist, one or the other taking precedence as the reader’s, actor’s, director’s or teacher’s focus changes. None is intrinsically ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ (though in practice some are more convincing than others), and the play-text does not privilege one point of view over another, though any single interpretation may do so. What has been especially striking about productions and citations of this play is the way it has been appropriated, consistently over the years, as a commentary on a current political situation, and on issues of morality, ethics, social responsibility and individual virtue in politics.”

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THIS is going to be interesting…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjRiylgwgIE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VA3ZSaC2nU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk4SK2dtJJ4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRQgfHewWkg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9med_5PV6lw

Our next reading:  Act One of Coriolanus

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning

Enjoy

Coriolanus

Act One, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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MAJOR CHARACTERS

Caius Martius, later known as Coriolanus, a Roman patrician

Menenius Agrippa, another patrician

Titus Lartius and Cominius, generals and patricians

Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother

Virgilia, Coriolanus’ wife

Young Martius, Coriolanus’ son

Valeria, a Roman lady

Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus, tribunes (representatives) of the Roman people

Various Roman Citizens and Soldiers

Tullus Aufidius, a Volscian general

Volscian Lords, Citizens and Soldiers

Adrian, a Volscian

Nicanor, a Roman

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Act One:  Struck by famine, Rome is starving and its citizens are in revolt. A mob, on its way to lynch the city’s most hated patrician, Caius Martius, is halted along the way by Menenius, a fellow patrician. Taking advantage of his reputation for fair-dealing, Menenius holds the crowd back, but reckons without Martius’ appearance and announcement the mob should be hanged. Rome, though, has other worries besides famine: Aufidius’ Volscian army is marching towards the city, and Martius is appointed to join Cominius’ retaliatory force. As the city waits for news of the battle, Volumnia boats to Virgilia of her son’s military prowess, noting that her grandson is taking after his father. On the battlefield, meanwhile, the wounded Martius performs bravely, reversing a Roman retreat and masterminding the occupation of Corioles. Once Roman victory is confirmed, Cominius bestows the honorific “Coriolanus” on his brilliant deputy. Aufidius, defeated and humiliated, begins to plot his revenge.

The most powerful empire the world has ever known, Rome played a major role in Shakespeare’s career.  Four of his plays (and one of his poems) have Roman settings, and a Roman army even enters into the early Britain of Cymbeline. In Shakespeare’s eyes, the Empire appears in the most unlikely and varied of places.  Henry V’s triumphant return from Agincourt becomes in the Chorus’s words (as you might recall), the arrival of a “conqu’ring Caesar.” Macbeth, back in Scotland, refused to “play the Roman fool” and dies on his sword even as he knows Macduff’s army is about to defeat him. And even Falstaff manages to name-check the most famous Roman victory of all, when bagging a rebel prisoner he boasts, “He saw me and yielded, that I may justly say, with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome, ‘I came, I saw, and overcame.’”

Coriolanus, though takes us inside Rome itself, and what we find there is grim. Where Antony and Cleopatra counterpoises an oppressive Rome with the wide, luxurious, exotic (and erotic) expanses of Egypt, in this play we, along with the people of Rome, are trapped inside the city while the Volscian enemy circles outside. There has been famine and the people are out on the streets, inflamed by rumors that the city leaders have been (as Menenius so delicately puts it), “cupboarding the viand,” or storing food away for themselves while everyone else starves. Despite Menenius’ desperate attempts to make peace, insisting that the patricians have “most charitable care” for the people, the scandalized citizens are not buying it:

First Citizen:

Care for us? True, indeed! They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury to support usurers; repeal daily any unwholesome act established against the rich; and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.

(I.i.77-84)

These complaints about the abuse of political power have an eerily modern, even contemporary ring, but there are few among today’s audiences (in the industrialized West at least) who truly know what it’s really like to “famish.” But the same could not be said of Shakespeare’s first audiences. At the time Coriolanus was premiered, times had been hard, especially in the bard’s home county of Warwickshire. The so-called “Midlands Riots” during the early summer of 1607 had been touched off by a cycle of bad harvests and rampant inflation in food prices, made even worse by the illegal enclosure of common land.  Peasants protested, but were (naturally) brutally suppressed by local gentry – events whose repercussions were witness by Shakespeare, who spent some of 1608 in Stratford attending to the arrangements for his mother’s funeral.

As a local landowner himself, a case has been made that Shakespeare must naturally have sided against the rioters. But, a reading of Coriolanus makes this seem difficult to believe. Trying to disperse the starving crowd (Shakespeare combines his sources’ two riots into one for dramatic purposes), Menenius insists that there is simply no point in complaining, “For your wants/Your suffering in this dearth,” he begins,

     you may as well,

Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them

Against the Roman state, whose course will on

The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs

Of more strong link asunder than can ever

Appear in your impediment

(I.i.64-70)

Protest is useless, he says, the state rolls on and continues. But, though Menenius’ words have sometimes been taken to imply that Coriolanus is a politically conservative play, what seems striking here (it seems to me) is the way in which the crowd, while desperately hungry, is being fobbed off with nothing but words — words that guarantee that, far from being at the heart of the city, they have no say whatsoever in how it is run.

But Menenius’ somewhat clumsy attempts to calm the crowd are upset by the sudden arrival of Caius Martius, the man whose downfall they are really after. His view of the plebs, while hardly designed to win them over, is at least honest. “What would you have, you curs?”, he demands to know,

He that trust to you,

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. Your virtue is

To make him worthy whose offence subdues him,

And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness

Deserves your hate, and your affections are

A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that

Which would increase his evil. He that depends

Upon your favours swims with fins of lead,

And hews down oaks with rushes.

(I.i.168-79)

We rely on Caius Martius’ words to enliven what is otherwise a linguistically austere play. The view of Shakespeare’s main source, the North translation of  Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus, that Martius was “choleric and impatient” is made here to look like, at best, a dangerous understatement. Irascible and disdainful, Martius hates the crowd, but (in his terms at least) that makes him deserving of “greatness.” The Romantic critic William Hazlitt fought against his own passionate liberalism to admit that in Coriolanus, “the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power,” and indeed, there is something bordering on the hypnotic in his unstoppable raging against the mob. Among all of Shakespeare’s heroes, Martius is the only one able to transform utter contempt into what seems, almost, like a virtue.

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From Jan Kott:

“The first scene of Coriolanus opens with the entry of mutinous plebeians. The theme, the conflict, the protagonists of the play are all stated at the outset:

First Citizen:  You are all resolv’d rather to die than to famish?

Citizens:  Resolv’d, Resolv’d!

First Citizen:  First, you know Caius Marcius is chief enemy to the people.

(I.i)

This is practically the opening of the play. Shakespeare never wastes any time. The situation has been stated. There is famine in Rome; the plebeians demand reduction of the grain prices. Caius Martius does not agree to it. The plebeians resolve to kill Martius. Action begins in the very first minute. Very soon the theme of the play will be stated. Plebeians shout at each other in a rather confused manner, but in their speeches a detailed theory of class division is formulated. It is based on three elementary contrasts: some people work, others feed on their misery; some are poor, others are rich; some are placed low and have to obey, others are placed high and rule. All this is contained in the plebeian exclamations of the first scene:

The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.

………………………………………………………

They…suffer us to famish, and their storehouses cramm’d with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will;…

(I.i)

At this point, the patrician Menenius Agrippa enters. He has been sent by the Senate to calm the rebels. Agrippa admits that there is hunger, that there are the rich and the poor. But he takes a different view of causes and effects. The poor starve not because the rich have too much for themselves. The patricians care for the people. Poverty is the judgment of the gods. This is the way the world has been arranged, and no one can change the eternal order: (MY NOTE:  Some things never change…)

…For your wants,

Your suffering in this death, you may as well

Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them

Against the roman state:…

……..

…For the dearth,

The gods, not the patricians, make it, and

Your knees to them (not arms) must help.

(I.i)

Agrippa speaks in verse; the plebeians in prose. Class distinctions have to be observed even by Shakespearean heroes. But it is something more than a mere distinction between verse and prose. Agrippa counters the simple spatial ‘top-bottom’ metaphor of the plebeians, based on consciousness of class oppression, with a metaphor of society as a great organism. He tells the plebeians the famous story about the revolt of parts of the body against stomach. Stomach stands for the Roman Senate, rebellious parts of the body, for the plebs. Agrippa’s fable has already been quoted by Livy and Plutarch. But Agrippa’s fable is also a theory of class division, as seen by the patricians. The brutal dichotomy of the plebeians is opposed by a functional and organic theory. Both theories are shown by Shakespeare in their class functions. They provide means of agitation, as well as justify action. This is just the way they have operated in history.

Agrippa’s arguments have had a great political and academic career. They were repeated by Theodoretus of Ciro in the first centuries of the Christian era (‘Masters participate in the cares of their servants, but servants do not participate in the cares of their masters.’), as well as by American planters in times of Franklin D. Roosevelt (‘We have to take care of the provision of grain, the financing of the lease and all such things, while the black farm laborers expects to be provided for by us, and has no cares whatsoever as long as he is maintained by us.’). Agrippa’s concept of class interdependence was proclaimed by the physiocrats (‘a perfect entity composed of various parts, necessary to each other’), and by the nineteenth-century papal encyclicals. It was developed by Spencer and Durkheim into a scientific system of sociology. Shakespeare needed just five minutes to state this theory.

The first scene of Coriolanus is not yet over. Agrippa has hardly finished telling history when Caius Martius appears. He begins to revile the plebeians in his very first sentence:

…..What’s the matter, your dissentious rogues

That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,

Make yourselves scabs?

(I.i)

Agrippa is the ideologue of the patricians, in the sense in which Marx contemptuously used the word ‘ideologue.’ Agrippa is a tactician and philosopher of opportunism. Martius is not an ideologist and rejects all tactics. Martius accepts the class distinction that is superficially in accord with the plebeian view: the antagonistic, vertical division between top and bottom where both sides feel deadly hate for each other. He tells the senators:

…..You are plebeians

If they be senators; and they are no less

When, both your voices blended, the great’st taste

Most palates theirs. They choose their magistrate;

And such as one as he, who puts his ‘shall,’

His popular ‘shall,’ against a graver bench

Then ever frown’d in Greece.

(III.i)

Martius accepts two of the classic opposites of the plebeian theory: the rich – the poor, the rulers – the governed. But in these two, he adds two more: the noble – the base, the wise – the fools. To him the people are like animals that bite each other, hate the stronger, and cannot remember today what they wanted yesterday:

…What would you have, you curs,

That like nor peace nor war? The one affrights you,

The other makes you proud.

………………………………………

….Who deserves greatness

Deserves your hate…

…………………………………..

…Trust ye?

With every minute you do change a mind

And call him noble that was nor your hate,…

…………………………………………

…in these several places of the city

You cry against the noble Senate, who

(Under the gods) keep you in awe, which else

Would fee on one another?

(I.1)

In Plutarch, Martius also hates the people mainly because he is consumed by pride, a recluse, who does not know how to deal with men. Plutarch really feels himself in sympathy with Agrippa’s practical reasoning, Shakespeare mocks Agrippa, at best giving him a part similar to that played in Hamlet by Polonius. From the first to the last scene of the tragedy the conflict is between Coriolanus and the people. As in all Shakespeare’s great dramas it is a conflict about the conscription and moral value of history; a difference of views on how the world is really arranged. Coriolanus, as Shakespeare see him, is proud and uncontrollable, too. But his actions do not result (or at any rate not wholly) from flaws in his character, or from ‘lack of learning’ as Plutarch would have it. The tragedy of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus cannot be defined, or contained in psychological terms. Nor is it a tragedy of a great personality in conflict with the masses, as most commentators maintain. There are no masses in Coriolanus. There are just the patricians and the plebeians.

Coriolanus accepts the class contrasts, as the plebeians see them, but it is easy to observe that he alters their character and transfers them into categories of values. Plebeians do not call themselves noble, or the patricians, wicked. They only know they are hungry because the others are full. Agrippa denies the existence of the hungry and the full, for one cannot say that the hands are hungry when the stomach is full. Coriolanus accepts the division into the hungry and the full, but does so not because it has been the will of the gods. Coriolanus does not believe in gods and has no need for them. He regards the people as animals who, when well fed, will only grow insolent and attack men. The city will be devoured by rats.

…Thus we debase

The nature of our seats and make the rabble

Call our cares fears; which will in time break ope

The locks o’ th’ Senate and bring in the crows

To peck the eagles.

(III.i)

Three theories of class division have been stated and thoroughly discussed, up to their final consequences. Each of them contains an exposition of social reality and a system of values; each means a different view of the world and gives a different evaluation, a different reply to two basic question: how is the world arranged, and how should it be arranged? It is easy to find general terms to define these systems, such as: egalitarianism, solidarity, hierarchic system. Coriolanus presents a most ruthless and antididactic confrontation of these three systems. As usual in Shakespeare, there is a great system of mirrors, reflecting the people in the eyes of Coriolanus, as well as Coriolanus and the patricians in the eyes of the people. The last mirror is provided by History. History in drama provides the course of action, interrelation and the final consequence of events. History can either confirm systems of values or ridicule and destroy them. If it ridicules and destroys, it is grotesque, or tragic; or even, perhaps, both.”

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William Hazlitt, writing in The Examiner, December 15, 1816

“The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is, that those who have little shall have less, and those who have much shall take all that others have left.”

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From Bloom:

“T.S. Eliot famously preferred Coriolanus to Hamlet, weirdly insisting that Coriolanus was best tragedy. I assume that Eliot was being perverse, even if he sincerely believed that Hamlet was ‘an aesthetic failure.’ Shakespeare’s rhetorical art is deliberately subdued in Coriolanus; on the scale of King Lear or Macbeth or Antony and Cleopatra, this later tragedy scarcely exists at all. It fascinates because it is so large a departure from the creative ecstasy of the fourteen months of composition just preceding. In my many hears of incessantly teaching Shakespeare, I have encountered much initial resistance to Coriolanus, which for readers and playgoers is something of an acquired taste.

Read or seen in sequence with the high tragedies, Coriolanus may seem more problematical than it is. Shakespeare, here and in the evidently unfinished Timon of Athens, experimented with essentially unsympathetic protagonists, though his genius found ways of making them sympathetic despite themselves. Coriolanus is no Brutus, Roman patriotism counts for little to Martius, compared with a purely personal honor. Shakespeare had explored the uses of a protagonist’s sense of outrage with the hero-villain Macbeth. Coriolanus’s concept of his own honor has been outraged by his banishment, while Timon’s outrage stems from am all-but-universal ingratitude. Both Coriolanus and Timon are outrageous, but because of their conviction that they have been outraged, we join ourselves with them at crucial moments. This is another of Shakespeare’s originalities, another way of inventing the human.

Eugene Waith and A.D. Nuttall, in very different yet complimentary ways, have alerted other critics to the remarkable vision of Coriolanus leading the Volscians on, which is conveyed by the Roman general Cominius to the fearful tribunes who exiled the Herculean hero:

He is their god. He leads them like a thing

Made by some other deity than nature,

That shapes man better; and they follow him

Against us brats, with no less confidence

Than boys pursuing summer butterflies,

Or butchers killing flies.

(IV.vi.91-96)

Waith speaks of Coriolanus’s ‘superhuman bearing,’ thus returning us to the paradoxes of this strange figure: at once a god and a child, an infant Mars indeed! Nutall, in a suggestion I find extraordinarily useful for all of Shakespeare, points to the Hermetist myth of man as a mortal god in ‘like a thing/made by some other deity than nature.’ I have sketched this myth – of man as a mortal god – as Shakespeare’s likeliest cosmology in my introductory chapters, and follow Nuttall in citing it again here. Coriolanus, ‘a kind of nothing,’ hopes to ‘stand/As if a man were author of himself/And knew no other kind.’ Because of his mother, and her peculiar nurture of him, this ultimately will not be possible for him. And yet his authentic heroism is his hermetic endeavor to be the mortal god Coriolanus, and not the perpetually infantile Caius Martius. Barren inwardly, almost empty, he nevertheless possesses a desperately heroic will.

That last sentence almost could refer to Iago, but Coriolanus is anything but a villain, even a hero-villain. He is so oddly original a character that description of him is very difficult. Kenneth Burke suggested that we regard this play as a ‘grotesque tragedy.’ Timon of Athens certainly fits that phrase, but the enormous pathos that Coriolanus provokes in us seems other than grotesque. Shakespeare subtly does not offer us any acceptable alternatives to Coriolanus’s sense of honor, even as we are shown how limited and crippling that sense becomes when it is challenged. The hero’s mother, his friends, and his enemies, both Roman and Volscian, move us to no sympathy whatsoever. No one, except perhaps T.S. Eliot, has been able to identify with Coriolanus. Hazlitt – who remarked, ‘We are Hamlet’ – might also have insisted that only the Duke of Wellington could confuse himself with Coriolanus.

Coriolanus, I would venture, is Shakespeare’s reaction-formation, or belated defense, against his own Antony, a much more interesting Herculean hero. Since Coriolanus was composed after Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare would have been peculiarly aware of the discontinuity between the two Herculean protagonists. Antony, very much in decline, nevertheless retains all of the complexities, and some of the virtues, that made him a superb personality. Insofar as Coriolanus has any personality at all, it is quite painful, to himself as well as to others. Cleopatra, more even than Antony, touches and transcends the limits of personality. From Coriolanus on, Shakespeare retreats from personality. Timon is closer to Ben Jonson’s satiric ideograms than he is to Shakespearean representatives from Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona through Cleopatra. And the mode critics have named ‘Shakespeare’s late romances’ itself seems to take precedence over human mimesis; even Imogen, Leontes, and Prospero are on the border  between realistic personality and symbolic being. Perhaps Caliban and Ariel are personalities, but then Caliban is only half-human, and Ariel is a sprite. Part of the immense fascination of Coriolanus, for me, is that in it Shakespeare experience a sea change, and abandoned what had been the center of his dramatic art. No one from Coriolanus on is a free artist of himself or herself. Cleopatra, an astonishing act of human invention, was Shakespeare’s farewell to his richest gift, and I wish we could surmise why this was, or perhaps had to be. Was Shakespeare weary of his own enormous success at inventing the human? Inwardness, Shakespeare’s largest legacy to the Western self, vanishes in Coriolanus, and never quite makes it back in later Shakespeare. Cleopatra’s vast inner self dies no ordinary death, she is transmogrified, and so we are left with no occasion for grief or regret. One way of seeing the change in Shakespeare is to contrast Cleopatra’s question regarding the fatal asp – ‘Will it eat me?’ with Coriolanus’ ‘Alone I did it,’ his final vaunt to the Volscians. Cleopatra’s whimsical, childlike question is endless to meditation, and charms us, and fills us with fresh wonder at her personality; Coriolanus’s boast is childish, and its poignance is infinitely more limited.

In all questions as to his development, we return to surmise about Shakespeare, the most enigmatic of all dramatists. The poetry of Coriolanus is properly harsh, even strident, since so much of the play is tirade. Shakespeare is in complete control of his form and his material, perhaps in too perfect a control. Not even Shakespeare can subdue King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra to ordinary designs: wildness keeps breaking out. Lear and Edmund, Macbeth and Cleopatra, all get away from their creator, just as Falstaff, Hamlet, and Iago are instances of Hobgoblin run off with the garland of Apollo. There are no transcendental energies whirling about in Coriolanus. Caius Martius himself has very little mind, and no imagination whatsoever. The play is the assertion of an immensely professional dramatist over his material poetica: we feel that Coriolanus does exactly what Shakespeare wants him to do. Shrewd and powerful as it is, Coriolanus is not one of the enlargements of life. It is almost as though Shakespeare had set out to defeat Ben Jonson upon his rival’s own chosen ground, since Coriolanus is in many ways the work that Jonson failed to write in Sejanus his Fall (1605), itself an inadequate attempt to correct and overgo Julius Caesar. Coriolanus continues to move scholars and critics, but not the generality of readers and playgoers, who are less impressed by its perfection as neo-classic tragedy. Yet Jonson was never a shadow for Shakespeare, as Marlow had been for so long, and more of a personal recoil from his own achievement has to be ascribed to the playwright of Coriolanus. Shakespeare had outdone himself in the five great tragedies; into that abyss of the self even he did not care to venture further. Starting back from inwardness gave him (and us) Coriolanus, which is surely the strangest of all Shakespeare’s thirty-nine plays. I mean strangeness in a double sense: uncanniness and also a new kind of aesthetic splendor, reduced yet unique. Given up a great deal, Shakespeare achieves formal perfection, of a sort he never repeated.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGwenj4QY2c&list=PL5D4AAE479860FCF0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOZUxxIFuuE&list=PL5D4AAE479860FCF0

My next post:  More on Act One of Coriolanus, with excerpts of Tanner, Garber and more…

Enjoy your weekend.

Coriolanus

Act One, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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From Garber:

“Coriolanus’s powerful mother, Volumnia, clearly dominates her dutiful son, who is free and independent on the battlefield but subservient to Volumnia in all private and political concerns. In the Victorian era, itself governed by a powerful queen, Volumnia was praised by such a major Shakespearean critic as F.J. Furnivall, who wrote that ‘from mothers like Volumnia came the men who conquered the known world, and have left their mark for ever on the nations of Europe…no grander, nobler woman, was ever created by Shakespeare’s art.’ Late-twentieth-century productions of the play in Britain underscored, less flatteringly, the overbearing Volumnia’s similarity to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In an analogous fashion the corn riots of Coriolanus’s own time 491 B.C.I., feeling described by Plutarch and cited within the play as a chief complaint of the people, were paralleled, during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, by corn riots in Oxfordshire (1557) and the Midlands (607). The displacement of tillage by pasture (the grazing of sheep and cows rather than the planting of crops) and the enclosure of common land (its acquisition or cooptation by aristocrats and landowners) created food shortages across the country. The tension between high and low was exacerbated by fashion, since the starched ruffs of the aristocrats were maintained by the use of cornstarch. Rather than feeing the people, the corn that was grown thus often contributed to the elegance of courtiers. In recent productions a contemporary dimension of the historical corn riots in Coriolanus has been evoked through topical allusions to contemporary food shortages, global famine, or Farm Aid concerts. Such tranhistorical topicalities are a mark of virtually all Shakespeare productions these days, but it is worth emphasizing the sense in which Coriolanus is repeatedly discovered as a trenchant and unexpected commentary on the modern political and social scenes, whether by poets like Eliot (in his ‘Coriolan’), playwrights like Brecht, journalists, political commentators, or directors.

It may be useful in approaching Coriolanus to recall the last words of Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra, in which the new Caesar spoke in his elegy for the larger-than-life mythic lovers, and pointed, in effect, toward two different kinds of drama, declaring that ‘their story is/No less in pity than his glory which/Brought them to be lamented.’ Pity is an essential Aristotelian element of tragedy, and glory is the fundamental attribute of the heroic history play. The play thus concludes by offering the audience a bifocal choice of sympathies, points of view, and genres. In Coriolanus, as in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s other well-known ‘Roman play,’ the audience is offered a similar, double-barreled choice, a choice, as Coriolanus himself observes in a flash of insight in the fifth act, between a ‘happy victory’ for Rome and a ‘mortal’ (human and tragic) outcome for its hero. The play ends in death and in victory, in the ambush and murder of a man whose final flaw was his first yielding to human feelings, who was safe so long as he regarded himself as a monster without kin or a lonely dragon in his fen. Shocking, yet somehow fittingly, it is only at the moment when Coriolanus acknowledges himself as a member of the human race, as a man with human ties – mother, wife, child, friends – that he becomes really vulnerable. For this act of simple human recognition he is murdered. It is as if he had to become human so that h e could die. At the same time the play ends in victory for the Roman cause, the Romans reconciled now with the Volscians so that the city is saved.

The play is, then, among other things, a tragedy of context – the story of a man whose nature, as Menenius says, ‘is too noble for the world’ (3.1.255). The last words we hear are Tullus Aufidius’s assurance that Coriolanus ‘shall have a noble memory’ (5.6.154), while a Volscian lord praises him as ‘the most noble corpse that ever herald/Did follow to his urn’ (143-144). This is a suitably honorific sentiment – but what good, in the jostling, pragmatic world of politicians and plebeians, is a ‘noble corpse?’ Would it not be better to be a less noble living man? In act 3 Coriolanus himself answers this hypothetical question with a resounding no. He exhorts the Roman senators, those who ‘prefer/A noble life before a long/ (3.1.155-156) to reject the tribunes of the people and their importunate demands for food and power – and he is expelled from the city as a traitor. His mother, the superb and overpowering Volumnia, the voice of Rome in this play, takes the opposite view, urging her son to mildness, suggesting that he use his brain and not his heart: ‘You might have been enough the man you are/With striving less to be so’ and ‘I would have had you put your power well on/Before you had worn it out’ (3.2.19-20, 16-17). The canny, political Aufidius, who is in some ways the Octavius to Coriolanus’s Antony, the realist to his idealist, the modern man to his epic hero, speculates about whether it is ‘pride,’ or ‘defect of judgement,’ or stubborn ‘nature’ that makes Coriolanus the way he is. Plainly all three elements characterize Coriolanus’s actions and decisions, and they are all, in the play, quintessential ‘Roman’ traits. But in order to come to some understanding of Coriolanus’s nature and the structure of his rise and fall we have first, I think, to look at his context and environment and see how he measure himself against it.

The Rome of Antony and Cleopatra was a busy and confident political metropolis, bustling with intrigue and calculation.  The time of Augustus Caesar, as we have noted, was also the time of the birth of Christ. By contrast, the Rome of Coriolanus, some five hundred years earlier, seems to be more like a small town in the midst of Italy (or England), populated by a wavering multitude of poor citizens on the one hand and a crew of old men and generals on the other. The opening stage direction is explicit and indicative: ‘Enter a Company of mutinous citizens with staves, clubs, and other weapons.’ This Rome is not the sophisticated home of the mature Antony and the cagy Octavius, not yet the city of Brutus’s ruminative honor and the younger Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar. This is instead a Rome that shows us a power vacuum and the manipulations of the up-and—coming new men, the two tribunes, rising agitators and politicos, trying to craft a power base out of citizens armed with crude weapons instead of thoughts.

Strikingly, the citizens in the play are described as ‘voices.’ This use of ‘voice,’ which in the period could mean ‘the right or privilege of speaking or voting’ and ‘that which is generally or commonly said,’ rumor or report, is a central trope for Coriolanus, both the play and the hero of its title. ‘I shall lack voice,’ says the eloquent Cominius, in self-deprecating formulaic language, as he launches into his compelling speech in praise of Coriolanus’s war deeds. The people’s ‘voices,’ meaning ‘votes,’ is what Coriolanus the candidate stands in the marketplace – awkwardly – and angrily – seeking. He himself does ‘lack voice,’ in the sense that he is completely devoid or artifice or social grace. ‘[C]ould he not speak ‘em fair?’ asks the old counselor Menenius in desperation once Coriolanus has boiled over into intemperate imprecation (3.1.261). Perhaps most centrally, ‘voices’ is a classic metonymy, the use of the part for the whole, an important figure of speech used over and over again in the play, as a rhetorical device but also unmetaphored or re-literalized – as in Menenius’s celebrated set piece, the fable of the belly.

The fable of the belly belongs to a familiar genre in political rhetoric, the story of the ‘body politic.’  The king or ruler is the head; the other ranks of society and polity are represented, in this allegorical construction, by limbs and organs working in concert to create a healthy body. Such allegorical fables, images of the body politic used as guides for the proper relationship of governor and governed go back as far as Livy, the Roman historian, and not only were popular but were highly useful to theorists of Italian civic humanism in the sixteenth century. In Shakespeare’s time Edward Forset’s Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) is a leading example. Livy’s History of Rome is the direct source of Shakespeare’s account, and its version of Menenius’s belly fable is very similar – except that Shakespeare has added dramatic details (the interruption of the angry First Citizen, called by Menenius ‘the great toe of this assembly’) and, most tellingly humourous and animate characteristics (‘For look you, I may make the belly smile/As well as speak’)

A comparison between Livy’s version and Shakespeare’s will be instructive. Livy describes Menenius as ‘an eloquent individual, and one well liked by the plebs, as he had been born one of them,’ and reports:

‘On being admitted to the camp he is said merely to have related the following apologue, in the quaint and uncouth style of that age: In the days when man’s members did not all agree amongst themselves, as is now the case, but had each its own ideas and a voice of its own, the other parts thought it unfair that they should have the worry and the trouble and the labour of providing everything for the belly, while the belly remained quietly in their midst withy nothing to do but to enjoy the good things which they bestowed upon it; they therefore conspired together that the hands should carry no food to the mouth, nor the mouth accept anything that was given it, nor the teeth grind up what they received. While they sought in this angry spirit to starve the belly into submission, the members themselves and the whole body were reduced to the utmost weakness. Hence it had become clear that even the belly had no idle task to perform, and was no more nourished than it nourished the rest, by giving out to all parts of the body that by which we live and thrive, when it has been divided equally amongst the veins and is enriched with digest food – that is, the blood. Drawing a parallel from this to show how like was the eternal dissension of the bodily members to the anger of the plebs against the Fathers, he prevailed upon the minds of his hearers.’

Livy, History of Rome, 2.32

Here is Shakespeare’s dramatic rendering of the same passage, only slightly altered, but very different in effect and tone:

Menenius:

There was a time when all the body’s memb ers,

Rebelled against the belly, thus accused it:

That only a gulf it did remain

I’th’ midst o’th’ body, idle and unactive,

Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing

Like labour with the rest: where th’ other instruments

Did see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,

And, mutually participate, did minister

Unto the appetite and affection common

Of the whole body. The belly answered –

First Citizen:

Well, sir, what answer made the belly?

Menenius:

Sir, I shall tell you. With a kind of smile,

Which ne’er came from the lunge, but even thus –

For look you, I may make the belly smile

As well as speak – it tauntingly replied

To th’ discontented members, the mutinous parts

That envied his receipt; even so most fitly

As you malign our senators for that

They are not such as you.

……………………………

First Citizen:

The former agents, if they did complain,

What could the belly answer?

 Menenius:

     I will tell you,

If you’ll bestow a small of what you have little –

Patience – a while, you’st hear the belly’s answer

First Citizen:

You’re long about it.

Menenius:

     Note me this, good friend:

Your most grave belly was deliberate,

Not rash like his accusers, and thus answered:

‘True is it, my incorporate friends,’ quoth he,

‘That I receive the general food at first

Which you do live upon, and fit it is.

Because I am the storehouse and the shop

Of the whole body…

…….

     And thou that all at once’ –

You, my good friends, this says the belly mark me –

First Citizen:

Ay, sir, well, well.

Menenius:

     ‘Though all at once cannot

See what I do deliver out to each,

Yet I can make my audit up that all

From me do back receive the flour of all

And leave me but the bran.’ What say you to’t?

…………………

The senators of Rome are this good belly,

And you the mutinous members…

Coriolanus 1.1.85-103, 112-123, 129-135, 137-138

Livy’s Menenius tells a good story – echoes of this same passage can be found in King Lear, another play written in the same period that is deeply concerned with mutinies in the body politic (‘Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand/For lifting food to’t?’ [Lear 3.4.16-17])

But Shakespeare’s masterful Menenius is at once funny, deft, and pointed. His artful use of colloquialisms (‘cupboarding the viand’), dialect (‘look you,’ a stereotypical Welsh usage), and direct address (‘You my good friends, this says the belly, mark me’) demonstrates in action what Livy asserts about Menenius’s affinity for speaking with the common people (here labeled English-sounding ‘citizens’ rather than Roman ‘plebs’). The fable of the belly unfolds as something like a cross between an animated cartoon and a stand-up comedy routine, ending in a sonorous blank verse utterance that is also a ‘gotcha’ punch line (‘The senators of Rome are this good belly,/And you the mutinous members.’)

In effect, Menenius is able to disarm his onstage hearers, gently drawing them into his tale, prodding them verbally (‘mark me’; ‘What say you to’t?’), soothing them with language, and amusing them with his apparently harmless story of the talking and smiling belly – until the noble soldier Caius Martius, who will later be surnamed Coriolanus, arrives and undoes all his patron’s work with a single ill-tempered curse. To the greeting, ‘Hail, noble Martius!’ he snaps back, ‘Thanks – what’s the matter you dissentious rogues,/That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,/Make yourself scabs?’ (1.1.152-154). The First Citizen’s replay make sit clear that is not an extraordinary but rather an ordinary exchange: ‘We have your good word.’ So much for Menenius’s attempt to soothe festering wounds and disagreements with words, with a pretty tale.

Yet Menenius’s fable is central to the play in many ways. It suggests and introduces the language of fragmentation, of dismembering and body parts, that will continue throughout as an emblem of the diseased condition of Rome. Not only are the senators a belly and the First Citizen a ‘great toe,’ but we also hear that the tribunes of the people are ‘[t]he tongues o’th’ common mouth’ (3.1.23), and Coriolanus will accuse them of failing to restrain their charges: ‘You being their mouths, why rule you not their teeth?’ (38). ‘The noble tribunes are the people’s mouths,’ says one citizen ‘[a]nd we their hands’ (3.1.271-272). The tribunes for their part, return the compliment, describing Coriolanus as a diseased limb, a foot that once did noble service but is now gangrened and must be cut away for the health of the rest of the body. Menenius laments that in Coriolanus emblematic body parts are scrambled: ‘His heart’s his mouth./What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent’ (25258). Coriolanus will later address the citizens as ‘you fragments’ – and he himself will be summarily fragmented, banished from Rome.

The fable of the belly establishes the immediate source of the citizens’ dissatisfaction: corn, the demand for food so ridiculed by Coriolanus. Everywhere in the play this political and economic issue turns up as an image, a part of the play’s verbal texture. Grain and harvest are key images throughout Shakespeare. The England of his time was, after all, a largely agricultural nation, the same verbal patterns can be found in Renaissance translations of the Bible At the end of Macbeth, Malcolm speaks of ‘[w]hat’s more to do/Which would be planted newly with the time.’ Richmond (crowned King Henry VII) at the close of Richard III speaks of ‘smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days.’ The characters in King Lear talk continually of seeds, and ‘germens,’ and harvest. But in Coriolanus the patricians are the grain, the plebeians musty chaff, and Coriolanus himself is the harvester. His mother, Volumnia, calls him a ‘harvest-man,’ sent out ‘to mow/Or all or lose his hire (1.3.33-34), but the harvest of which she speaks is dead bodies. Coriolanus himself will lament that ‘we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed, and scattered’ (3.1.75) the seeds of sedition by permitting power to the common people. In fact, he is not only harvester but grim reaper, refusing to sort flour from bran, grain from chaff (5.1.24-32).

The play’s attitude toward various social stations and ranks – patricians, plebeians, tribunes, consuls, generals – is so deftly managed that, as we have noted, the play is capable of being produced successfully from both ‘the right’ and ‘the left,’ even though a partisan reading would necessarily be a reductive one. The citizens, whether Romans or Volscians, are portrayed as self-regarding, self-righteous, and vacillating, however just their claims. The moment war with the Volscians is announced, for example, the angry Roman mob steals away, ignoring Martius’s ironic suggestion that ‘[t]he Volscians have much corn’ and that war with them would solve the complaint of famine. Facing the city of Corioles, the common soldiers flee from the field of battle, leaving Martius to fight alone. They are interested only in looting and in spoils. Not only are they cowardly, they are also changeable. First they give Martius their voices, or votes, to be counsul, and then, guided by the canny tribunes, they withdraw their support. Again with the tribunes’ urging they succeed in banishing him from the city, and almost in throwing him from the Tarpeian rock to his death. But when the bad news comes that Martius, now surnamed Coriolanus, is arming against Rome, against them, the citizens change their tune: ‘When I said ‘banish him’ I said ‘twas pity.’ ‘And so did I.’ ‘And so did I, and to say the truth so did very many of us’ (4.6.149-151). Even in Antium, in the house of the general Aufidius, the mob is fickle and volatile. When Coriolanus arrives there in his mean disguise the servants shoo him out because he seems to be a poor man and no gentleman. But the moment Aufidius embraces and recognizes him, they take it all back: ‘I knew by his face that there was something in him,’ one serving man gushes. ‘He is simply the rarest man i’th world’ (4.5.159-160). At the end of the play, Coriolanus enters marching for the first time with the commoners, surrounded by his former enemies – and the people turn against him in the course of the scene and shout for his murder.”

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And from Tanner:

“Timon was first a god – or ‘godded’ by his sycophantic friends (to use an apt and striking non-verb from Coriolanus) – and then a beast. Coriolanus, in what appears to be the last of Shakespeare’s Roman plays (and thus, arguably, his last tragedy) seems to move inexorably towards becoming both at the same time. Both, and more besides. More and less. But here again, as once more and for the last time, Shakespeare turns to Plutarch for the main outlines of his hero and the events of his play, it signally helps to have some of North’s version of Plutarch before us:

‘Caius Martius, whose life we intend now to write…was brought up under his mother a widow…This man also is a good proof to confirm men’s opinions, that a rare and excellent wit, untaught, doth bring forth many good and evil things together…For this Martius’ natural wit and great heart did marvelously stir up his courage to do and attempt notable 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. Yet men marveling much at his constancy, that he was never overcome with pleasure nor money and how he would endure easily all manner of pains and travails, thereupon they well liked and commended his stoutness and temperancy. But for all that, they could not be acquainted with him, as one citizen useth to be with another in the city. His behaviour was so unpleasant to them by reason of a certain insolent and stern manner he had, which, because he was too lordly, was disliked. And to say truly, the greatest benefit that learning bringeth unto men is this: that it teachest men that be rude and rough of nature, by compass and rule of reason, to be civil and courteous, and to like better the mean state than the higher. Now in those days, valiantness was honored in Rome above all other virtues, which they call virtus, by the name of virtue itself, as including in that general name all other special virtues besides. So that virtus in the Latin was as much as valiantness. But Martius, being more inclined to the wars than any other gentleman of his time, began from his childhood to give himself to handle weapons…’

As we shall see, ‘handle weapons’ is what Shakespeare’s Coriolanus does from very first to very last. But first, one more amplification of his character from Plutarch:

‘For he was a man too full of passion and choler, and too much given over to self-will and opinion, as one of a high mind and great courage that lacked the gravity and affability that is gotten with judgment of learning and reason, which only is to be looked for in a governor of state: and that remembered not how willfulness is the thing of the world, which a governor of a commonwealth, for pleasing should shun, being that which Plato called ‘solitariness,’ as in the end, all men that are willfully given to a self-opinion and obstinate mind, and who will never yield to others’ reason but to their own, remain without company and forsaken of all men.’ (My italics)

During the Renaissance there was much discussion concerning the proper education and responsibilities of the good prince or governor – what qualified a person to exercise ‘the speciality of rule.’ As Plutarch stresses, it is precisely these qualifications which Coriolanus so signally lacks: he is a prime example of what Renaissance thinkers regarded as the ill-educated prince, a man from the governing classes who is, by nature, temperament, and upbringing, unfitted and unfit to rule. Magnificent as a soldier, he is disastrous as a politician. Shakespeare takes the latent tensions between martial and civic (and domestic) values, between the battlefield and the city, between – in the play’s terms – the ‘casque’ (a helmet) and the ‘cushion’ (indicating a seat in the Senate), and screws these tensions up to breaking point, dramatically exposing, in the process, not just their perennially potential incompatibility, but – in extremis – their very actual and active explosive oppugnancy. The problem – a permanent one – baldy stated is as simple as this. You could certainly could not found, much less renew and prolong, any form of civil society on such figures as Coriolanus. But it is debatable whether you could defend and thus preserve any such society without such men. (Having banished Coriolanus, the tribunes complacently say ‘Rome/sits safe and still without him’ – IV, vi.37. They could not be more wrong, nor was Rome ever more vulnerable.) Society cannot do without the sort of ‘virtus-valiantness’ embodied in Coriolanus; but, given its uncontainable explosiveness, it cannot very well do with it either. Shakespeare never took hold of a more enduring and intractable social problem. This is one of the most violent of Shakespeare’s plays, with tremendous and terrible powers released to do their ‘mammocking’ and ‘mangling’ work (two apt words – from the play – for the wrecking forces let loose). And, when Coriolanus is savagely cut down, we feel awed at what Bradley eloquently called ‘the instantaneous cessation of enormous energy.’

The legendary history of Coriolanus dates from the 5^th century BC, and refers to the creation of the tribunate of 494 BC and the corn riots three years later (Shakespeare, for more urgent impact, conflates these events). Phillips summarizes the importance of this period of Roman history for the Elizabethans. ‘The consular government which had supplanted the earlier monarchy underwent further modification in the direction of popular rule when economic unrest forced the Senate to grant political representation to citizens of Rome. One result of this concession was conflict between the democratic and aristocratic elements within the republic. In the turbulent history of Rome in this period Tudor theorists who argued in defence of monarchy and the hierarchy of degrees found a convincing demonstration of the dangers of democratic government (op. cit, p. 147). There was no previous play about Coriolanus, and his story was only occasionally referred to by political writers as illustrative of the dangers of popular riot, or of civic ingratitude. Shakespeare certainly uses Plutarch, but the play is all his own. He makes it a very ‘Roman’-feeling play. Four of the early Roman kings are referred to (Numa, Tullus, Ancus Martius, and Tarquin), and there are references to political and religious customs and the Roman mythology and pantheon. Dryden thought that there was something in the play ‘that is truly great and truly Roman’ – though, as always in Shakespeare, Rome and the Romans appear in a far from unequivocal light. But there are also Greek, Homeric echoes. Hector is twice named in connection with Coriolanus (and Virgilia is ‘another Penelope’). Plutarch mentions Homer as well, and he also names Achilles. Curiously, that name is absent from Shakespeare’s play, yet, given the well-known epic theme of the wrath of Achilles, this would seem a more appropriate name to invoke than that of the more moderate, temperate Hector – for Coriolanus is nothing of not ‘choleric.’ Perhaps, by withholding the obvious name, but reminding us of Greek heroes, Shakespeare is prompting us to see Coriolanus as an Achilles in a Roman context. (Achilles also had a mother, Thetis, who made him almost, but not quite, invulnerable – a point certainly not lost on Shakespeare.) Certainly, Coriolanus is another of Shakespeare’s great warriors, embodying an almost archaic heroic code, who gets hopelessly, disastrously confused when he is removed from the relative simplicities of the battlefield, and forced to negotiate the more complicated political world of the polis (I am thinking of, in particular, Titus Andronicus and Othello.) Coriolanus cannot, or will not, see that words and conduct which are most fitting and efficacious on the battlefield might be ruinously inappropriate in the city. The fearless and undefeatable soldier may, using the same code, sound politically like an intolerant and unacceptable tyrant. You can’t, in this case, make a cushion out of a casque.”

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And finally, from Frank Kermode:

“Coriolanus; the last of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is his most political play – not in the sense that it alludes openly to the politics of 1607-8, its probable date, but more abstractly. It is a study in the relationships between citizens within a body politic; the relationship of crowds to leaders and leaders to led, of rich to poor. The polis has its trouble; dearth, external enemies, enmity between classes. The patricians have a ruthless but narrow and selfish code of honour. The people are represented by tribunes who are in their own way equally ruthless, scheming politicians. The monarchic stage of Roman history has recently ended, the kings replaced by an oligarchy tending to be oppressive, committed to warfare as the ultimate proof of valour and worth, and largely indifferent to social obligation.

Coriolanus is their great warrior, bred to believe that personal merit can be measured by the number of wounds sustained in battle, saviour of the city but inept with the commonality, an ugly political innocent. The early years of King James I had seen popular disturbances in England, and a royal proclamation of 1607 stated that ‘it is a thing notorious that many of the meanest sort of people have presumed lately to assemble themselves riotously in multitudes.’ The virtues and defects of aristocracy had been demonstrated, towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, by the career of the Earl of Essex, a bold commander but a threat, ending fatally for himself, to state security. A sermon that William Barlow preached in 1601 characterized Essex as an ungoverned governor: ‘great natures prove either excellently good or dangerously wicked: it is spoken

by Plato but applied by Plutarch unto Coriolanus, a gallant young, but a discontented Roman, who might make a fit parallel for the late Earl.’ But Coriolanus is not a veiled comment on contemporary politics. It’s application is far more general; it concerns the education of an elite, the relations of power and need in a state, the tragic end of a great but exorbitant hero. Shakespeare hardly looked further than his well-thumbed Plutarch for the story, but he imposed a scheme on the material (which he adopted pretty freely) and wrote the play in a harsh, rather cold style suited to its theme of glorious war and civic strife.

Indeed, this is probably the most difficult play in the canon, and it prompts one to think again about the problems it must always have set audiences and readers. It is true that the original audiences, many of their members oral rather than literate were, as I mentioned in the Introduction, trained to listen and must have been rather good at following. Still, one might well ask what ‘following’ entails. In Shakespeare’s plays, especially after 1600, say from Hamlet on, the life of the piece, the secret of personation, is in the detail, and we need to understand as much of that as we can.

Coriolanus amply illustrates these new conditions. It has passages that continue to defeat modern editors, for example I.i.257-58, 267-78, and I.ix.45-46: ‘When steel grows soft as the parasite’s silk,/Let him be made an overture for th’ wars!’ Philip Brockbank, a first-rate editor, needed a note of almost a thousand words to justify his reading of ‘ovator’ for ‘overture’; whichever is right, the sense remains much too obscure for an audience to pick up in the theater. There are many such passages in the late plays. Once in Stratford I asked a well-known actor how he could deliver some lines in The Tempest that still baffle commentators: ‘But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labors,/Most buisl’est when I do it.’ (III.i.14-15). He said he would try to speak them as if he understood them perfectly. The idea was to prevent the audience from worrying about the meaning, the next best thing to making the meaning clear. Of course the actor mustn’t seem to be baffled, for that would be a false note in the characterization. The meaning is best left to editors and commentators. I myself, when editing The Tempest, wrote a note of about thousand words on the passage, to nobody’s great benefit.

However, there are times when obscurity is actually part of the personation, when a character is meant to be baffled and to show it. In Cymbeline, Jachimo makes a bewildering speech to Imogen, ranting on about Posthumus’s imaginery bad behavior in Italy, where, it is claimed, he was unfaithful to Imogen. Here is the latter part of Jachimo’s tirade:

It cannot be i’ th’ eye: for apes and monkeys

‘Twist two such shes would chatter this way, and

Contemn with mows the other; nor i’th’ judgement:

For idiots in this case of favor would

Be wisely definite: nor i’th’ appetite:

Sluttery, to such neat excellence oppos’d,

Should make desire vomit emptiness,

Not so allur’d to feed.

(I.vi.39-46)

The expression is so tortuous (and his subject so improbable) that Imogen cannot follow him and asks, ‘What is the matter, trow?…What,d ear sir,/Thus raps you? Are you well? (47, 50-51). We must think of Jachimo’s speech as delivered at speed, an impression confirmed by the lines with weak endings (‘and,’ ‘would’), the strangeness of the language about apes and monkeys, and the complexity of the last two lines: confronted with such ‘Sluttery’ (meaning Posthumus’s Italian mistress) sexual desire would strive to evacuate itself like someone vomiting on an empty stomach. The huddle of figures (apkes, idiots, vomiting), the remoteness of the language from its theme, the mysterious air of disgusted excitement – considering these aspects, the response of Imogen and presumably of the audience is intelligible.

Such writing is very different from the tone of Richard II’s great soliloquy, and is most striking when it’s used to imitate the actual movement of thought in a character’s mind. He may be studying a situation and deciding how to deal with it. Consider Brutus in the orchard (Julius Caesar, II.i). Her is on the brink of a terrible decision, whether to spare Caesar or to kill him, but there is not much in the lines to suggest great perturbation:

It must be by his death; and for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

But for the general. He would be crown’d:

How that might change his nature,

Julius Caesar is dated 1599, just before what I take to be a sort of revolution in Shakespeare’s language. When we compare this with the speech from Coriolanus, written eight or nine years later, that I quoted in full in the Introduction:

(Let me backtrack here to the Introduction):

The exiled Coriolanus has formed a union with his former enemy Aufidius. They are marching triumphantly on Rome. Aufidius feels some anxiety, some mistrust of his Roman ally. He meditates:

All places yield to him ere he sits down,

And the nobility of Rome are his,

The senators and patricians love him too;

The tribunes are no soldiers, and their people

Will be as rash in the repeal, as hasty

To expel him thence. I think he’ll be to Rome

As in the aspray to the fish, who takes it

By sovereignty of nature. First he was

A noble servant to them, but he could not

Carry his honors even. Whether ‘twas pride,

Which out of daily fortune ever taints

The happy man; whether defect of judgment,

To fail in the disposing of those chances

Which he was lord of; or whether nature,

Not to be other than one thing, not moving

From th’ casque to th’ cushion, but commanding peace

Even with the same austerity and garb

As he controll’d the war; but one of these

(As he hath spices of them all, not all,

For I dare so far free him) made him fear’d,

So hated, and so banish’d; but he has a merit

To choke it in the utt’rance. So our virtues

Lie in th’ interpretation of the time,

And power, unto itself most commendable,

Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair

T’ extol what it hath done.

(IV.vii.28-53)

I shall discuss the language of Coriolanus in due course – its extraordinarily forced expressions, its obscurity of syntax and vocabulary, its contrasts of prose and harsh verse, its interweavings of the domestic and the military. For the moment we are concerned with this single example. Coleridge thought this speech “beautiful in itself’ but called it ‘the least explicable from the mood and full intention of the speaker of any in the whole works of Shakespeare’ – an obscure remark, but it’s a comfort to know that even Coleridge had trouble following it, and also that despite its obscurity he thought it beautiful. He seems to be measuring it against some privileged prior knowledge of Aufidius’s ‘mood and full intention,’ but we cannot tell how he came by this knowledge, whichi we lack. Aufidius is contemplating Coriolanus in a way that is remotely like that in which Marcus contemplates Lavinia. But he is deliberate, speculative, not painting a picture for the audience but trying to make clearer to himself just how mixed his feelings are, how difficult he finds it to take a determined position on the standing of his ally, who has been a bitter rival in the past and may be a rival again. Throughout the speech there is a blend of respect, even affection, and envy. He thinks Coriolanus will easily take Rome, and puzzles over the circumstances that led to the exiling of such a superman, asking why he could not ‘carry his honors even.’ He introduces some general considerations concerning the nature and risks of power. One knows roughly what he is brooding about, and in that sense we can, despite Coleridge’s opinion, follow him. But the speech is very inward…There is no rhetorical code that covers the brooding, the starts and stops of thought which are features of Aufidius’s meditation. And it is certainly, ominously, obscure.

The simile of the osprey and the fish, a conventional bestiary illustration, is tersely adequate in its assertion of natural superiority; the oxymoron ‘noble servant’ illustrates with precision the dilemma of Coriolanus. There follows a series of tentative explanations: ‘whether…whether…or whether’: pride attendant on continuous success; inability to act in peace with the same assurance as in war – but note the strange synecdoches of ‘casque’ and ‘cushion’ (battlefield and senate house, represented by the military helmet and the cushion used by senators); and the hendiadys of ‘austerity and garb.’ Hendiadys is a way of making a single idea strange by splitting an expression in two, so that it calls for explanation as a minute and often rather sinister metaphor – a trick of which Shakespeare was for a time exceptionally fond and which he played most often in Hamlet. Most remarkable, and even more remote from the rhetoric of his early plays, is the device here used to simulate the movement of thought, the worrying over a perhaps insoluble problem by a mind animated by love and envy, a working out that takes precedence over clarity of expression:

but one of these

(As he hath spices of them all, not all,

For I dare so far free him) made him fear’d,

So hated, and so banish’d; but he has a merit

To choke it in the utt’rance.

One or other explanation must be right; in fact, Coriolanus has a touch of all these defects – no, not all, that is going too far; yet only one is needed to explain his fate; and even so finds it hard to say so, his virtues being so great.

That is roughly what these lines mean, if one takes the antecedent of ‘it’ in the last line to be the chief of the faults mentioned; if the antecedent is ‘merit,’ then Dr. Johnson’s explanation that the merit is choked by his boasting about it is the right one. Philip Brockbank, the Arden editor, is hesitantly willing to admit that Johnson’s reading points to a valuable ambiguity. This seems to me unlikely, but the point is that given this new way of representing turbulent thinking, so different from plainly formulated thought, set out clearly and reinforced by elaborately illustrative and copious comparisons, obscurities will inevitably plague commentators as well as audiences. It is a new rhetoric, substantially established about the time of Hamlet and highly developed by the time of Coriolanus and the Romacnes. Sometimes it takes the poet beyond the limits of reason and intelligibility.

What should be said about this transformation? That it occurred, substantially, in the course of the greatest decade of English drama; that it happened in the writing of Shakespeare and in the ears of an audience he had, as it were, trained to receive it. We register the pace of the speech, its sudden turns, its backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and disappearing before we can consider them. This is new: the representation of excited, anxious thought; the weighting of confused possibilities and dubious motives; the proposing of a theory or explanation followed at once by its abandonment or qualification, as in the meditation of a person under stress to whom all that he is considering can be a prelude to vital choices, emotional and political.

It may be said that the gradual toughening up of the language, accompanied by a new freedom of metaphor and allusion and a rougher handling of the pentameter, is a well-known feature of Shakespeare’s later work. That is so. But Coriolanus also illustrates another, subtler change, from the simpler expressiveness of the early plays to an almost self-indulgent, obsessive passion for particular words, their chimings and interchimings, their repetition. Of this, I shall have more to say later.

(Back to where we were)

…that I quoted in the Introduction, we can see clearly the change that had some over the language of the writer who dominated this great decade of English drama; we must infer that the change had affected the understanding of the ‘understanders’ who heard it in the theater. They had been trained to deal with such shifts. What we feel, even before we start to unpack the language, is its pace, its sudden turns and backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and disappearing before we can grasp them. We recognize the representation of anxious thought, a weighing of possibilities, a weighing of Coriolanus. Aufidius proposes a theory or explanation but abandons or qualifies it almost before he has uttered it, as a person might do under the pressure of similar considerations. This kind of thing was now being done in verse for the first time. If one had to say where it was first achieved, one might say in Claudius’s soliloquy in Hamlet, III.iii.

The gradual toughening and gnarling of language, accompanied by a new freedom and variety of metaphor and a more rugged pentameter, are well-recognized features of Shakespeare’s later work. But Coriolanus illustrates another and less obvious change. As I have tried to show, the earlier plays do on occasion indulge a passion for particular words, their chimings and repetitions and their semantic range; Love’s Labour’s Lost is an instance. In that play, and in other comedies, there is a good deal of play with what I have called, in Virginia Woolf’s expression, ‘little language.’ ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is in this sense an exercise in little language. Not much later comes the intricacy of the lexical chains in Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Macbeth, and Timon of Athens. In Coriolanus, we have this lexical and syntactic habit in its full maturity: stubborn repetition, free association, violent ellipses; in short, a prevailing ruggedness of tone.”

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I hope you all enjoyed this post despite it’s length – I thought the things that Kermode, in particular, brought up were fascinating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYRnJX__Di8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_elzXFIssw

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Our next reading:  Act Two of Coriolanus

Coriolanus

Act Three, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Three:  Coriolanus is about to be invested when the tribunes gleefully and triumphantly inform him that his popularity has evaporated. Furious, he declares that the people don’t deserve him, at which point the tribunes attempt to arrest him.  They fail, but Coriolanus is still forced to appear in the marketplace and answer the people’s objections. Despite Volumnia’s please to stay calm, Coriolanus, not surprisingly, loses his temper yet again, railing at citizens and tribunes alike.  He is banished for good.

Coriolanus nearly gets into office, until, of course, the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus succeed in turning the crowd against him and have him declared a traitor. Like Plutarch, they make much of his supposed “pride,” but Shakespeare, as is his want, makes that view seems way too simplistic. Coriolanus’s reluctance to hear his “nothings monstered” by Cominius after Corioles seems to demonstrate his personal humility; his refusal to wear the gown of humility demonstrates his moral probity; his determination to avoid (at all costs) flattering the citizens by showing them his scares underlines his loathing of hypocrisy (as well as his loathing of the citizens). Yet somehow, his ability to transform these seeming virtues into fatal weaknesses, and to be undone by his inability to swerve from his own view of the world, that fascinates us as readers. Under attack from the Volscians, he, as a man of war, is completely unflappable; underfire from his own people, he is unredeemable. Though he is accused of treachery and banished from the city, he reaches the decision that it is he that is banishing Rome, not the other way around:

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.

(3.3.124-7)

With those three magisterial words, Coriolanus goes out into the wilderness. Aristotle once observed that a man who cannot live in the polis is either a beast or a god, and we know enough about Martius to sense that the “city of kites and crows” (4.5.42) outside Rome’s walls is where he and the play have inevitably been heading. The soldier who carried “O’ me alone! At the gates of Corioles has, it seems, really nowhere else to go; and although he is not alone for long – he joins forces with his enemy Aufidius in order to get hold of his army – Coriolanus’s horrible vengeance on Rome is very much a solitary obsession.

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From Kott:

“Extras have already filled the stage. They will represent the people. On the inner stage or in the gallery resplendent senators are seated. On the apron stage, close to the audience, Coriolanus, Menenius and two tribunes stand. The latter are not ridiculous any more.

We charge you that you have contriv’d to take

From Rome all season’d office and to wind

Yourself into a power tyrannical,

For which you are a traitor to the people.

(III.3)

A seventeenth-century London street has suddenly in our eyes been transformed into a great scene of popular revolution. There is no such scene in Plutarch. Shakespeare was the first to throw the Roman toga of defenders of liberty and republic over the shoulders of two stinking and noisy London artisans. The Jacobins would recognize themselves better in Shakespeare’s tribunes of the people than on David’s huge canvases:

Brutus:

There’s no more to be said, but he is banish’d.

As enemy to the people and his country.

It shall be so.

Citizens:

It shall be so! It shall be so!

(III.3)

In scenes of battles and looting Shakespeare shows the eternal face of war and occupation. The most striking characteristics of Shakespearean tragedies is their historical universality. Shakespeare does not have to be modernized or brought up to date. History fills his plays with ever new contents and finds its reflection in them, in

every age. In the first scene of Coriolanus the plebeian theory of class division has been noisily stated. Now they stand opposite each other: the cold and elegant senators, and the plebeians, who shake their fists and raise their clubs. This is just the scenery, as unimportant as Plutarch’s anecdote. At the Capitol and at the Forum, laws of revolution, attitudes and conflicts, are all exposed sharply like formulas, condensed in bits of dialogue. Opposite each other stand: ‘top” and ‘bottom.’ Jacobins and Girondists, revolutionary democrats and liberals. The trial of Coriolanus is on.

Says Brutus, or the Jacobins:

     …those cold ways,

That seem like prudent helps are very poisonous

Where the disease is violent – Lay hands upon him

And bear him to the Rock.

Says Menenius, or the liberals:

Do not cry havoc where you should but hunt

With modest warrant.

……………………………………….

Killing our enemies, the blood he hath lost…

…………………………………………

And what is left, to lose it by his country

Where to us all that do’t and suffer it,

A brand to th’ end o’ the’ world.

……………………………………………….

                   The service of the foot,

Being once gangren’d, is not then respected

For what before it was.

……………………………………….

                  Proceed by process.

Says the Senator, or the aristocrats:

     Noble Menenius,

Be you then as the people’s officer.

Masters, lay down your weapons.

Says Brutus, or the Jacobins:

Go not home.

The people in Coriolanus are stupid and ignorant; they stink and collect stinking rags in battlefields. The tribunes are little, deformed, and deceitful. Coriolanus is brave, great and noble. But the people are Rome, and Coriolanus is a traitor to his country.

Sicinius:

What is the city but the people?

Citizens:

True!

The people are the city.

Brutus:

By the consent of all we were establish’d

The people’s magistrates.

Citizens:

You so remain.

It is only now that the second, forceful part of the drama opens. The Plebeians have exiled Coriolanus from Rome. The cowardly patricians have deserted him. Rome has not appreciated his bravery and nobility. Rome has proved itself base.

…..Despising

For you the city, thus I turn my back.

There is a world elsewhere.

(III.3)

But Shakespeare’s world is crowded, and there are no empty spaces in it. There are just patricians, plebeians, and enemies of Rome. Coriolanus can only choose his place in the world that has been set on fire. He does not, and cannot, go away into nowhere, as romantic heroes do. Situations are historically determined, are above and independent of him. Coriolanus will go to the Volscians. History has proved the plebeians right: the enemy of the people has become the enemy of Rome. In the first three acts of Coriolanus a bare drama of class attitudes has been played out. One could call it also a drama of historical inevitability. There is no discrepancy in it between social situation and action, or psychology. Coriolanus could be nameless, just as the First, Second, and Third Citizens are nameless. He is just an ambitious general, who hates the people and went over to the enemy camp when he was unable to achieve dictatorial power. It is only from the moment of Coriolanus’s treason that the world ceases to be clear-cut and arranged according to one principle. History is not a teacher of lay morality any more. The world’s contradictions become the next theme of the tragedy.”

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And from Garber:

“In this play the citizens are described as dogs, rabbits, curs, geese, crows pecking at eagles, and a common herd. Aufidius, by contrast, is for Coriolanus a noble quarry, ‘a lion/that I am proud to hunt.’ These animal similes will persist throughout the play, making a kind of subliminal beast fable. Coriolanus himself is at times described as a lamb, hunted and destroyed by the wolf (the emblem of Rome, who suckled Romulus and Remus – a she-wolf personified in this play this play by the dominating and patriotic Volumnia). Coriolanus resents appearing before the people in his ‘womanish toge’ (2.3.105) a complex phrase alluding to the white (candida) toga worn by political aspirants – the source of the word ‘candidate.’  The Bible warned against false prophets who came like wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15). Coriolanus, as we will see, regards such politicking among the commons as an unworthy lie. So he is lamb and wolf at once, the play’s animal subtexts binding together without strain the layered codes of ancient fable, Roman mythological history, and Christian allegory. He is also, by inference, a ‘butterfly,’ like the one we are told his son tears to pieces – ‘whether his fall enraged him, or how ‘twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it!’ Virgilia’s praise of her passionately destructive son invokes the signword for his father: ‘Indeed, la, ‘tis a noble child’ (1.3.59-60, 63). Like father, like son – nobility is closely allied to love and destruction.

But of all the animals in this animal-filled play to which Coriolanus is compared and compares himself, the most striking of all is the dragon. In act 5 Menenius says of him, ‘There is differency between a grub and a butterfly, yet your butterfly was a grub. This Martius is grown from man to dragon’ (5.4.9-11). But the ‘dragon’ term has been chosen by Coriolanus long before, as he is banished from Rome:

     I go alone,

Like to a lonely dragon that his fen

Makes feared and talked of more than seen…

(4.1.30-32)

A lonely dragon – a heroic, belated, socially isolated survival of another world.

Coriolanus is neither commoner nor political senator. He is often spoken about, seldom speaking. Lartius says of him early in the play that he has been a soldier ‘[e]ven to Cato’s wish’ (1.5.28), that he adheres to the old Roman virtues. Like Antony (and Hector, and Hotspur, and Tybalt), he chooses to fight by single combat, alone. ‘O’ me alone,’ he cries to the people, ‘make you a sword of me?’ (1.7.76). And at the close of the play, so poignantly and pitifully, we hear of his final suicidal boast to the Volscians that he alone conquered their city, the city of Corioles, the city whose name he now bears as a trophy attached to his own: ‘Alone I did it.’ (5.6.117). Like the innocent he is, he does not realize, in the heat of his anger and despair, that to brag of having taken their city is the surest way to bring on his own death. In this moment he is indeed a lamb going to the slaughter, and his innocence of the world has structural affinities with other doomed Shakespearean ‘innocents,’ like Desdemona and Duncan, whose trust in other people led to their downfall. Coriolanus trusts a code, not an individual, but his trust is similarly misplaced and outdated. He is purer than the world that contains him, a lonely dragon, the repository – for all his faults and flaws – of a lost set of Roman virtues.

We learn from Aufidius that he and Martius have sworn that if they meet in single combat they will fight until ‘one can do no more’ (1.2.36). But Aufidius is at heart a politician, and he ultimately backs away from single combat in a way that emphasizes, by contrast, Martius’s own uncompromising valor. In act 1, scene 9, the two men fight on the field of battle, but at the last minute other Volscians come to Aufidius’s aid. Initially Aufidius condemns their ‘[o]fficious’ interference, but by the end of the first act he has abandoned the idea of fighting ‘[t]rue sword to sword’: ‘I’ll potch [thrust] at him some way/Or wrath or craft may beg him’ (1.11.15-16). The vernacular word ‘potch’ is a good emblem of the lowering of ideals and expectations. In the second half of the play we see Aufidius openly scheming to take advantage of Coriolanus’s pride and weakness. Like Hotspur, who called out ‘die all, die merrily’ as he went into battle, Coriolanus prefers a noble life before a long. Yet Hotspur’s heroics were coupled with an articulate and witty passion for his wife. Coriolanus, though married and a father, regards himself, with wounded and defensive pride, as alone. More than almost any other Shakespearean hero, he aims at a status that is less like that of a man and more like that of a dragon, a god, or a machine – someone, or something, in other words, that does not feel.

In this play that is so directly about language and the ability to speak (or not to speak), the audience fittingly hears of Coriolanus’s transformation into a god, and into a force of nature, in the speech by the general Cominius before the Senate, a speech that begins with the rhetorical gesture of incapacity ‘I shall lack voice’:

I shall lack voice; the deeds of Coriolanus

Should not be uttered feebly…

…………………………………..

The man I speak of cannot in the world

Be singly counterpoised. At sixteen years,

When Tarquin made a head for Rome, he fought

Beyond the mark of others. Our then dictator,

Whom with all praise I point at, saw him fight

When with his Amazonian chin he drove

The bristled lips before him…

……………………………………

    In that day’s feats,

When he might act the woman in the scene,

He proves best man i’th’ field, and for his meed

Was brow-bound with the oak. His pupil age

Man-centered thus, he waxed like a sea,

And in the brunt of seventeen battles since

He lurched all swords of the garland…

         His sword, death’s stamp,

Where it did mark, it took. From face to foot

He was a thing of blood, whose every motion

Was timed with dying cries. Alone he entered

The mortal gate of th’ city…

…………………………..

And with a sudden reinforcement struck

Corioles like a planet…

(2.2.78-110)

Coriolanus is a master orator, as effective in his resounding public style as Menenius was in the more folksy prose narrative of the belly fable. His ‘I shall lack voice’ recalls Mark Antony’s ‘I am no orator as Brutus is’ and offers a similarly deceptive platform of low expectations. The ‘profession of incapacity’ is of course a familiar rhetoric trope, used by politicians, as well as poets, from ancient times. Under Coriolanus’s skilled manipulation Coriolanus turns, before our eyes – or ears – from a boy so young he is almost a woman, with a beardless ‘Amazonian’ chin, fighting men with ‘bristled lips,’ to a hero whose brows are bound with garlands of oak, the traditional emblem of military honor (compare today’s ‘oak-leaf clusters’ in bronze or silver, awarded to U.S. soldiers for extraordinary heroism and gallantry in battle). The next permutation transforms Coriolanus into a sea, a natural and irresistible force, and by the end of the speech he will have become an entire planet, invading and destroying the city of Corioles.

But in the midst of these rhetorical descriptions of powerful nature is one comparison of the hero that is at once more ambiguous and more disturbing: ‘He was a thing of blood, whose every motion/Was timed with dying cries.’ The Roman hero becomes a thing, one mechanically motivated, like a ticking clock or a bomb. This is a movement away from human ties, a movement that is at the root of Coriolanus’s political troubles, making him, like Othello, both a superb soldier and a particularly innocent and naïve man. A thing. When, banished from the Rome and the mother that have given him his identity, Coriolanus goes in noble pique to join forces with the enemy, the Volscian troops under Aufidius, this language of things, of gods and machines, increases ominously:

Cominius:

He is their god. He leads them like a thing

Made by some other deity than nature.

(4.6.94-5)

Menenius:

When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading…He sits in his state as a thing made for Alexander…He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.

(5.4.15-20)

Cominius:

‘Coriolanus’

He would not answer to, forbade all names,

He was a kind of nothing, titleless.

(5.1.11-13)

‘[A] kind of nothing.’ For Coriolanus, this transformation to a god or a thing is something his banishment has forced upon him, and something that, like a hurt child, rejected by Mother Rome, he welcomes as protective coloration, a benign numbness. He speaks with ironic and juvenile pleasure a bout getting back at the Romans, and, in the last act, about his own rejection of Menenius – a man who ‘[l]oved me about the measure of a father,/Nay, godded me indeed’ (5.3.10-11). And he boasts with equal spite, and equally transparent pain, that he has no social or genealogical connection to the world. ‘Wife, mother, child, I know not’ (5.2.78). He says he will henceforth decline to yield to filial instinct, ‘but stand/As if a man were author of himself/And knew no other kin’ (5.3.35-37). As if a man were his own maker: a god, a thing, an automaton – anything but a man.

This propensity to reject or displace family and personal ties, in favor of the presumed larger purposes and less fraught emotional commitments to warfare and heroism, produces in Coriolanus the play a striking and persistent line of imagery that allies its martial heroes with what has been called ‘male bonding’ or ‘homosocial’ behavior – in this case the identification of the love object with the military commander or military rival. Thus Martius on the battlefield, early in the play, exclaims his pleasure at reunion with his general, Cominius:

O, let me clip ye

In arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart

As merry as when our nuptial day was done,

And tapers burned to bedward!

(1.7.29-32)

[MY NOTE:  I’ll have more to say about the play’s homoeroticism – Aufidius and Coriolanus in particular – in my next post.]

We seldom hear him speak with similar intimacy to his temperate and loyal Roman wife, who bears the patriotic name of Virgilia. To a certain extent this erotic language for war is conventional as well as powerfully evocative: in Antony and Cleopatra the soldier Antony, a formidable lover, pledges that he will go to death as eagerly as a bridegroom to his bed. But in Coriolanus  it is something more, since it is precisely the erotic tug-of-war, between private love and public fame, that is missing, replaced by a double cod of honor. The use of the word ‘arms’ here is particularly striking, since it is only in English, not in Latin, that this pun on the martial and the martial is feasible. The Latin arma means ‘battle gear,’ as in the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘Arma virumque cano’ (Of arms and the man I sing). The Teutonic ‘arm,’ or earm, denotes the body part, and traces to the Latin word for ‘shoulder,’ but the sublime cleverness of ‘let me clip [clasp] ye/In arms as sound as when I wooed’ is distinctively Shakespearean, and it offers a superb example of the playwright’s accomplishment in combining – at a crucial moment in the history of the language – the strands of native and classical inheritance.

In the early battle, Coriolanus embraces a fellow warrior as soundly and as merrily as his wedded wife. By the fourth act, now estranged from Rome and his family, he finds himself addressed by Aufidius in similar, yet more expansive, terms:

    Let me twine

Mine arms about that body whereagainst

My grained ash an hundred times hath broke,

And scarred the moon with splinters.

[He embraces Coriolanus]

Here I clip

The anvil of my sword, and do contest

As hotly and as nobly with thy love

As ever in ambitious strength I did

Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,

I loved the maid I married; never man

Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,

Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart

Than when I first my wedded mistress saw

Bestride my threshold…

(4.5.105-117)

Aufidius feels more passion for this ‘noble thing’ than he did for his bride on their wedding night. Once more, this is rhetoric, not sexual invitation. [MY NOTE:  Really?] Yet the line between them is a thin one, as Aufidius’s servants note, perceiving the way their master flirts with his guest at the dinner table. ‘Our general himself makes a mistress of him…and turns up the white o’th’ eye to his discourse’ (4.5.193-195). The deepest passions of generals are for their colleagues, and perhaps even for their enemies. To see this performed and articulated in Coriolanus is to have further light shed on the complex erotics of Othello.

Coriolanus is a complicated dramatic character, the more so because he seems to have uncanny ahistorical similarities with embedded social types of a much later era, like the products of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British public schools: he is repressed; devoted to authority; committed to male bonding, fellowship, risk, and danger; slightly overpunctilious; impatient or condescending toward perceived social inferiors; awkward and even unhappy in situations that require small talk, gracious manners, accommodation, compromise, and a show of feeling. Brought up by that remarkable woman Volumnia, who is a cross between political matriarch and stage mother (Rose Kennedy and Mama Rose in the musical Gypsy), Coriolanus has also been effectively analyzed through the lines of Freudian theory; as Volumnia herself will say, ‘There’s no man in the world/More bound to’s mother’ (5.3.159-160).

We have the mother’s word, early in the play, concerning her ambitions for her son: ‘To a cruel war I sent him, from where he returned his brows bound with oak’ (1.3.12-13). It is her hope that he will come back with bloody wounds, visible signs of prowess: ‘His bloody brow/With his mailed hand then wiping, forth he goes,/Like to a harvest-man that’s tasked to mow/Or all or lose his hire’ (31-34). At the articulation of this unusual maternal fantasy, the wife, Virgilia, blenches: ‘His bloody brow! O Jupiter, no blood!’ (35) but who, after all, is listening to Virgilia!

Volumnia, who is the terror of the tribunes, terrorizes Coriolanus’s wife, too. Like her son, she is a surprisingly ‘modern’ type as well as a recognizable classic and classical figure: the ambitious mother behind a successful son (who may wind up consulting an even more successful analyst). At the same time, as we have already noted, Volumnia has been praised as a grand and noble figure who shaped one of the ‘men who conquered the known world.’ Certainly her press has been more favorable in some eras than in others. What is indisputable is that she is a fabulous dramatic character, a part to die for. Her Shakespearean sisters are Lady Macbeth and Goneril, her pallid descendant the wicked queen (and wicked stepmother) in Cymbeline. Lady Macbeth’s children, missing from the plot, mentioned only in passing (‘I have given suck…’), are rhetorically sacrificed in favor of her husband-child’s ambition: Goneril’s womb is cursed by her angry father, who wishes for her nothing but sterility; and Cymbeline’s nameless queen has a clownish and loutish son for whom she, too, is overwhelmingly ambitious. Volumnia has the right son, and the right opportunity, to make him great, and to destroy him.

It is also worth noticing that once again in a Shakespearean play we have an absent parent, in this the father, his place ineffectually filled by Menenius, himself largely under Volumnia’s sway. ‘Is he not wounded? He was wont to come home wounded,’ he asks after the battle of Corioles. Again the wife, Virgilia, is appalled – ‘O, no, no, no!’ – and again she is overridden by Volumnia: ‘O, he is wounded, I think the gods for’t!…there will be large cicatrices [scars] to show the people’ Menenius and Volumnia tabulate that Coriolanus has twenty-seven wounds, a hero’s collection, and on parts of the body – the shoulder and the left arm – readily visible for a candidate dressed in a toga.

In plays from Romeo and Juliet to Othello and King Lear we have traced the fortunes lf self-confident young women who rebelled against their fathers, and sometimes paid a price for doing so. In Coriolanus the dyad is not father-daughter but mother-son, and the consequences of obedience, rebellion, and reunion in this case are equally significant. Volumnia urges her son to display his wounds to the people in the marketplace, and he retorts stubbornly: ‘I will not do’t’ (3.2.120). Eleven lines later he yields to her will: ‘Mother, I am going to the marketplace’ (3.2.131). Mother, I am going. In the play’s last act we will hear a tragic echo of this scene, when Coriolanus vows again ‘I will not’ (5.3.21) – and does. In a very serious sense his banishment from Rome is a rite of passage, and opportunity to leave the stifling home city, and his mother, and Menenius, an opportunity he finally does not take. Instead he reinstates the filial bond, reconciling himself to his mother in one of those striking scenes of child-parent reunion, like that of Lear and Cordelia, that seems so close to the center of the Jacobean Shakespeare.

In this single act, act 5, as we will see, Coriolanus simultaneously gains and loses. He gains humanity, and he loses life. He ceases to be the automaton, the soulless engine, the little god, and he becomes at once a fuller human being and a doomed one. His own words are full of self-knowledge and self-exposure as he consents to Volumnia’s request:

    O mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold the heavens do ope,

………………………………

You have won a happy victory to Rome;

But for your son, believe it, O believe it,

Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,

If not most mortal to him…

(5.3.183-190)

The word ‘mortal’ here carries, very strongly, both of its core meanings: Volumnia’s victory is most human, and most deadly, for her son. This is the paradox of tragedy, that to be human is to suffer, and that to be aloof from suffering is to turn one’s back on humanity, and to be merely a thing, a tin god. For Coriolanus this is an acknowledgment of the doom he knows will come. It is the tragic choice, the choice of tragedy, of pity rather than glory, in Octavius’s terms. Or as Aufidius the politician puts it, congratulating himself on Coriolanus’s impolitic act of principle, ‘I am glad thou hast set thy mercy and thy honour/At difference in thee. Out of that I’ll work/Myself a former fortune’ (5.3.201-203). ‘[M]ercy’ and ‘honour’ are other words for pity and glory. Coriolanus’s choice will make him a tragic figure, and not merely a Roma hero – a man, and not merely a god.

Whatever else it may be said to be ‘about’ – whether history, politics, heroism, or manhood – Coriolanus is also, very centrally, a play about language. Again and again in Coriolanus the hero is urged to use his eloquence to win over the common people to his cause – and again and again his language fails. His first entry onto the stage is marked in just this way by a failure of language, a curse on those ‘dissentious rogues’ those ‘scats,’ the people.’ His plea for their ‘voices’ in act 2 likewise fails:

Your voices! For your voices I have fought,

Watched for your voices, for your voices bear

Of wounds two dozen odd…

          for your voices, have

Done many things, some less, some more. Your voices!

(2.3.116-120)

Menenius, the old counselor, prides himself not only on his suasive narrative skills but also on his use of language as a safety valve: ‘What I think, I utter, and spend my malice in my breath’ (2.1.48-49). In fact, for this old man, who lacks physical strength, personal magnetism, and sexual vitality, language is power. And when Coriolanus fails in his dramatized confrontation with the people, Menenius in irritation asks, ‘[C]ould he not speak ‘em fair? Could he not tell the people what they wanted and expected to hear, play his part? Language for Menenius is manipulation, obfuscation, compromise, and politics. Language is also politics for Cominius, Coriolanus’s fellow general, elder, and sponsor (‘the deeds of Coriolanus/Should not be uttered feebly/). But no sooner does the audience hear the eloquent Menenius, the eloquent Cominius, than their politic language is interrupted by the plain speech, and often the insolent boorishness, of Coriolanus. ‘I cannot,’ he says, ‘bring/My tongue to such a pace.’ He cannot beg, he cannot ask, for favor.

Volumnia urges him to take part in what is essentially a stage play before the people, and Coriolanus argues that acting is dishonest. He distrusts fiction and playing, and he finds the role of actor both dishonorable and difficult. ‘I had rather have my wounds to heal again/Than hear say how I got them.’ (2.2.65-66). He prefers wounds to words: ‘When blows have made me stay I fled from words.’ He has not yet made his peace with language, and as always in Shakespeare language is the index of humanity. When Volumnia comes to her son with what she regards as a harmless little scenario, her proposal that he display his worthiness and manliness to the people, she conveys to him a violation of every rule and law of honesty to which he has heretofore been trained:

If it be honour in your wars to seem

The same you are not, which for your best ends

You adopt your policy, how is it less or worse

That it shall hold companionship in peace

With honour, as in war…?

(3.2.47-51)

Since you are so ready to deceive in war, why not in peace? If in action, why not in language?  But the apparently innocuous suggestion here is deeply shocking to the innocent and unworldly Coriolanus.

From this point in the play, from the third act onward, Coriolanus behaves almost as if he were a man in a dream – or a nightmare – walking through a scenario he can hardly understand, and certainly cannot justify. Look at the elaborate stage directions he gets from Volumnia as she presses him to display himself in the marketplace:

    I prithee now, my son,

(She takes his bonnet)

Go to them with this bonnet in thy hand,

And thus far having stretched it – here be with them –

Thy knee bussing the stones – for in such business

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant

More learned than the ears – waving they head,

…………………………..

     Say to them

Thou art their soldier…

…………………………..

Go and be rule, although I know thou hadst rather

Follow thine enemy in a fiery gulf

Than flatter him in a bower.

(3.2.72-82, 90-92)

In short, he is to kneel to them, bare and bow his head, and apologize because he lacks the language to speak to them glozingly and seductively, like a politician. ‘Might I with my base tongue give to my noble heart/A lie that it must bear?’ he asks (3.2.100-101). Must he perform a part/ The simple answer of the politicians, Volumnia, Menenius, and Cominius, foster parents and campaign managers is yes. ‘Come, come, we’ll prompt you,’ says Cominius, and Volumnia teases him with the promise of the most elusive reward of all, a mother’s approval: ‘To have my praise for this, perform a part/Thou hast not done before’ (3.2.106, 109-110). Nothing could be further from his nature, or from his capability. Furthermore, since the tribunes, predictably, are also in rehearsal (3.3) preparing to goad Coriolanus into self-betraying speech, it is no surprise to find that all the prompting in the world cannot prevent him from exploding the moment they provoke him with a carefully chosen epithet, the word ‘traitor.’ ‘How, traitor?…The fires i’th’ lowest hell fold in the people!’ (3.2.69, 71). Menenius sees the disaster but is helpless to stop it – ‘Is this the promise you made your mother?’ – and Coriolanus replied by rejecting the entire concept of language as power: ‘I would not buy/Their mercy at the price of one fair word.’ (3.3.90, 94-95)

When Coriolanus rejects politics-as-usual, the commoners reject him, and banish him from the city. His response is characteristic…’I banish you…There is a world elsewhere…’ Banishment in Shakespeare is always highly fraught, whether it is Romeo’s banishment from Verona or Bolingbroke’s banishment from England, but for Coriolanus the experience is especially destabilizing. (Unlike those other cases, where the banished character temporarily departs from the play, here the play’s action follows the banished hero.) His ‘I banish you’ is a gesture of alienation, not only from Rome but also from the world of human interaction and language.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoKSYarcFI8&list=PL5D4AAE479860FCF0&index=6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6EF1st8mZQ

Thoughts so far?

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning, more on Act Three of Coriolanus.

Coriolanus

Act Three, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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Let’s talk briefly about homoeroticism in Coriolanus.

It seems clear, I think that the inquires about each other by Martius and Aufidius and their speculative exchange of places certainly reveals, at a minimum, a mutual fascination bordering on…something very sexual, as is evident in some recent productions:  Tyrone Guthrie’s 1963 production at the Nottingham Playhouse focused on a sexual attraction between Martius (John Neville) and Aufidius (a young Ian McKellen). In 1981, Brian Bedford’s  “rough trade” production pushed the tension between Aufidius and Coriolanus to the limits at the expense, some critics felt, of Volumnia and Virgilia.  Keep this in mind when you read Act Four where, I think, the “thing” between the two men becomes quite evident.

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From Tanner:

“Having made him what he is – ‘Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me’ (III.ii.129), Volumnia, on two crucial occasions, uses her influence to persuade him against his better judgement (or steely, intransigent resolve) to go right against the rigid martial inclinations and instincts which she herself nurtured in him. it is she who launches the idea that he should stand for consulship – ‘There’s one thing wanting, which I doubt not but/Our Rome will cast upon thee.’ Knowing that that will involve having to ingratiate himself with the common people whom he quite intemperately and viscerally loathes, Coriolanus, rightly, senses immediately that such a role is not for him – ‘Know, good mother,/I had rather be their servant in my way/Than sway with them in theirs’ (II.i.207-10). In particular, he shrinks in aversion from the prospect of having to put off his armour and don the ‘vesture of humility’ and then going to stand in the market-place, showing his wounds and begging for votes. Such a parade of pseudo-humility ill becomes a man who is uncorruptibly a total soldier – a butcher-soldier perhaps, but with his martial integrity intact. Quite simply, he won’t do it:

     I do beseech you

Let me o’erleap that custom, for I cannot

Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them,

For my wounds’ sake, to give their suffrage. Please you

That I may pass this doing.

(II.ii.136-40)

More pertinently – ‘It is a part/That I shall blush in acting’ (II.ii.145-6). Coriolanus is a soldier who can, emphatically, do deeds (there is much stress on this), but who cannot act parts. But Volumnia is a mother who always gets her way. So he tries, though not without some heavy irony concerning the self-falsification it involves. ‘I will practice the insinuating nod, and be off to them most counterfeitly; that is, sir, I will counterfeit the bewitchment of some popular man’ (II.iii.103-6). Though his instinct is all the other way. ‘Rather than fool it so,/Let the high office and the honor go’ (II.iii.126-7). After his session in the market-place, he cannot wait to ‘change these garments’ – thereby ‘knowing myself again’ (II.iii.153). He seems to have the people’s ‘voice,’ but then the tribunes agitate the crowd and it turns against Coriolanus. Coriolanus lets the tribunes know what he thinks of ‘the mutable, rank-scented meiny [crowd]’ (III.i.66), and as his anger mounts his words concerning the people (Hydra-headed mob etc.) become more bilious and choleric, until the tribunes can say he has ‘spoken like a traitor’ (III.i.162), and urge his execution. Coriolanus draws his sword – knowing himself again – and the people are beaten back. He intends to be uncompromisingly defiant, uncompromisingly himself, come what may – ‘yet will I still/Be thus to them’ (III.ii.5-6). But he has reckoned without his mother – and her maternal desires and ambitions. She wants to be able to say ‘my son the consul’ as well as ‘my son the soldier.’ Coriolanus is confused. His mother had taught him always to despise the people:

     I muse my mother

Does not approve me further, who was wont

To call them woolen vassals, things created

To buy and sell with groats…

(Volumnia enters)

     I talk of you:

Why did you wish me milder – Would you have me

False to my nature? Rather say I play

The man I am.

(III.ii.7-16)

But she, with some clever if partly specious arguments, urges him to play the man he is not:

     You are too absolute;

Though therein you can never be too noble

But when extremities speak. I have heard you say,

Honor and policy, like unsevered friends,

I’ th’ war do grow together. Grant that, and tell me

In peace what each of them by th’ other lose

That they combine not there.

(III.ii.39-45)

Coriolanus’s response is a rather helpless ‘Tush, tush!’ as well it might be, since the point is a tricky one, though one that touches on the problem at the center of the play. All’s fair, certainly in war, and there it is not incompatible with ‘honour’ to outwit your enemy with ‘politic’ stratagems. So why not in peacetime? Why not trick the plebeians, for the honor of a consulship? Coriolanus knows, or rather feels, that there is an important difference, but he is quite unable to argue it through. No man is less a sophist than Coriolanus. Just what his ‘nature’ is, and what being true or false to it might entail, we must consider later. Here, his mother – ‘I would dissemble with my nature…I should do so in honor’ – asserts herself as his instructor-director:

    speak

To th’ people, not by your own instruction,

Nor by th’ matter which your heart prompts you,

But with such words that are but roted in

Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables

Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth.

(III.ii.52-7)

We have only recently heard Coriolanus’s old friend Menenius say of him – ‘His heart’s his mouth: /What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent’ (III.i.256-7), and we should recognize that, with their theatrical instructions – ‘perform a part,’ ‘come, we’ll prompt you’ (Cominius) – his mother and the supporting Roman nobles are making an impossible demand of Coriolanus. Cornered, the intellectually unresourceful Coriolanus can only capitulate, though not without a good deal of foot-dragging and something like a tantrum of protest at the self-division, self-dispersal, indeed self-dissolution, which is being asked of him:

    We., I will do’t…

You have put me now to such a part which never

I shall discharge to th’ life.

(III.ii.101-6)

Be like a harlot, eunuch, virgin, knave, schoolboy, beggar? – why can’t I just be a soldier? Why should I make my mind and body play false to each other? No, damn it, I won’t go through with it! At which, his mother turns from him, as if giving up on a child in a particular fretful and tiresome mood. ‘At thy choice then.’ As much as to say – well, if you are going to be that difficult! And Coriolanus wilts back into her scolded, remorseful little boy.

     Pray, be content:

Mother, I am going to the marketplace;

Chide me no more…

(III.ii.130-52)

And, though we do not know it yet, there will indeed be some ‘boy’s tears’ to follow. This mother will be the death of him.

Coriolanus leaves for the market-place, attended by the hopeless injunction – ‘mildly’ (repeated three times), ‘Well, mildly be it then – mildly’ (III.ii.145). ‘Mildness’ is certainly not in his nature, whatever that nature might be; and, as the tribunes well know it, it will take little to make him ‘play the man I am’:

     Being once chafed, he cannot

Be reined again to temperance; then he speaks

What’s in his heart, and that is there which looks

With us to break his neck.

(III.iii.27-30

Coriolanus is nothing if not honest, and once the tribunes have ‘chafed’ him by calling him ‘traitor’ (the word is not in Plutarch), he let’s fly at the people with such vitriolic fury that by communal (or rather, mob) agreement, he is banished. His response is, we may say, predictable:

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.

…Despising

For you the city, thus I turn my back.

There is a world elsewhere.

(III.iii.120-35)

Brave and powerful talk; and we can surely still respond to a something heroic in Coriolanus’s ‘absolute’ and unyielding refusal of compromise, his furious and contemptuous rejection of the mass, the masses, the world here. The question the remainder of the play will explore is whether it is finally possible for Coriolanus to ‘banish’ Rome – his city, his class, his friends, his family, his mother. Or – put it another way – can there finally be, for a Roman, ‘a world elsewhere?’”

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From Kermode:

“Coriolanus will not play the part assigned him. Since he can only ‘play/The man I am’ (III.ii.15-16), he is plainly not a politician. The opening of Act III repeats the litany of tongues, mouths, teeth, and voices, taste and palate. The plebs are to him merely a disease, physically repellent, and their voices, which sum them up, equally so. It is his failure to see that nevertheless they are the city (III.i.198) that changes the perspective and shows him to be the diseased part of the body politic. (‘He’s a disease that must be cut away’ [293].)  The first two scenes of this act insist on this theme of disease: sores, gangrene, infection, and iteration consonant with the theme of the body politic as outlined by Menenius. Coriolanus is undone by choler (anger, one of the humours of the body, and when out of control the cause of illness and disease), and he ignores Menenius’s counsel: ‘Put not your worthy rage into your tongue’ (240). Doing exactly that, he narrowly avoids execution and is banished from the city. His responses to the sentence are celebrated. ‘I banish you!’ (III.iii.123) and ‘There is a world elsewhere’ (135). Under the sway of the tribunes, scorned by Coriolanus (‘You being their mouths, why rule you not their teeth?’ (III.i.36), the people turn into a mob, as Coriolanus turns into a mechanism of violence.”

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And from Van Doren:

“The movement of ‘Coriolanus’ is rhetorical. As in ‘Julius Caesar,’ but more bleakly than there, the streets of Rome are conceived as rostrums where men meet for the sole purpose of discussing something – the character of the hero and its effect upon a certain political situation. Shakespeare is interested in the character and the situation, but he is conscious of being interested; he is addressing himself with all the sobriety of his intelligence to a subject which has not been created by the play itself or even by its respected godfather, Plutarch. It is a subject whose existence does not depend upon dramatic art, nor is the artist in this case wholly absorbed in it as he was in the subject of ‘Hamlet,’ whatever that is. We do not know what the subject of ‘Hamlet’ is; we only know that the play is of inexhaustible interest. The interest of ‘Coriolanus is not easily exhausted; many things in it are meritorious, and the writing has a steady, dogged strength which the judicial critic may admire; but it has its limits, and these are clearly defined by a list of the things Shakespeare has taken out in talk.

Coriolanus is a tragic hero whom we listen to and learn about entirely in his public aspect. His heroic fault, which is pride, is announced in the first scene as a theme for discussion; and the play is that discussion. He is almost never alone with himself, and when he is, in the soliloquy at Antium (IV.iv.12-26), he has nothing to say to himself that we do not already know. Passionate as he is, and eccentric too, he is somehow not personal. His character is of that clear kind which calls for statement; but in poetry and drama statement is one of the obscurer mediums. Groups of people – tribunes, citizens, servants, officers laying cushions in the Capitol, travelers on the highway, the ladies of his household – are forever exchanging opinions on the subject of Coriolanus. And the individuals who share with him the bulk of our attention are here for no other purpose than to make leading remarks about him. Competent as the scene is (I.iii) which introduces the ladies to us, and adroitly as they are distinguished from one another throughout the play, the ‘faint puling and lament’ of the wife Virgilia always contrasting with the antique Roman rage of the mother Volumnia, the lady who emerges farthest from the group, Volumnia herself, exists first and last as a setting for her son. The pleasure she would have taken in sacrificing a dozen such sons for Rome (I.iii.23-7), the fact that she can exclaim:

Now the red pestilence strikes all trades in Rome,

And occupations perish,

(IV.i.13-4)

and the very brevity with which she can sum herself up in ‘Anger’s my meat’ (IV.ii.50) – these things show where Coriolanus came from, just as her strictures upon his extreme behavior show that he has come too far. And his old friend Menenius, who speaks exceedingly well in garrulous prose, speaks nevertheless to the end that we shall understand Coriolanus as well as speeches from any external source could persuade us to. ‘What I think, U utter’ (II.i.58), says Menenius, who is willing to be known as a ‘humorous patrician,’ one that ‘converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning,’ so long as he can have his say. He is accused by the tribune Brutus of being ‘a perfecter giber for the table than a necessary bencher in the Capitol’ (II.i.90-2), and his old man’s mind does run by preference on food. This bestows upon him a particularity which is welcome in so generalized a play, and his tongue has oftentimes clean skill, as when he says of Coriolanus: ‘There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger’ (V.iv.30-1). Yet we have only to perceive the parallel between him and Polonius to know how far he comes from existing in his own right as Ophelia’s father did. He as much as anyone in ‘Coriolanus’ keeps it wordy – witness the way he rubs irony in with six repetitions of ‘You have made good work’ (IV.vi) – though it would be wordy enough without him. Blood in the play is once again what it was in ‘Julius Caesar,’ verbal. We hear that Coriolanus has lost more blood than he had in him by many an ounce, that he is ‘smear’d with it as if it were paint, that he looks like one flayed, that at Corioli he was ‘a thing of blood’ from face to foot. But this is political blood laid on in metaphor, just as the death of the hero is a catastrophe cut into the fable from a point without. The death of Coriolanus is inevitable not because of his character or because of his career as we have followed it, but because Aufidius hates him. This hatred, engraved on the surface of the tragedy as many as seven times, is a sign that cannot be missed, but it has nothing to do with the essential theme. Its origin is earlier than the play and has nothing to do with a rivalry between two leaders. The central conflict is between the leader and the led.

The political ‘meaning’ of the play is considerably less simple than it may seem. If it has to do with the difference between the many and the one that difference is viewed from both directions. The many, the Roman mob, are criticized without mercy, but so is Coriolanus as the one. The tribunes of the people are convicted of his pride (II.i.41), and there is something in Volumnia’s charge that it is they rather than he by whom the rabble becomes incensed (IV.ii.33). Certainly they are represented as dishonest demagogues (II.iii), and their complete wrongness with respect to the possibility of an attack from Aufidius (IV.vi) renders them as statesmen contemptible. The mob, as usual in Shakespeare, behaves badly, and even permits one of its members to castigate its many-headedness. (II.iii.19-26). But Coriolanus in turn as relentlessly dissected. His impossible pride is the subject of the play, which makes no attempt to ennoble this pride as a tendentious toryism might like to do – merely, that is, by elevating it above the animal authority of the mob.

His pride is animal too. The vigor of speech which scalds citizens with epithets – ‘rogues,’ ‘scabs,’ ‘slaves,’ ‘minnows,’ ‘measles,’ ‘mutable rank-scented many’ – is the vigor of a man whose voice can sound exactly like Caliban’s:

All the contagion of the south light on you,

You shames of Rome! you heard of – Boils and plague

Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorr’d

Further than seen, and one infect another

Against the wind a mile!

(I.iv.30-34)

And the price with which he ‘pays himself’ (I.i.33-4) is sometimes of that subhuman sort which consists of insulting those who would offer praise. Menenius urges Coriolanus to take his honor with his form, but Coriolanus is deficient in form. It is not merely that he cannot take compliments and gifts with grace; he cannot take them at all, and this is true whether they come from his inferiors or from his equals. The fastidiousness of the duke in ‘Measure for Measure’ which robbed him of any relish in the ‘aves vehement’ of his people is reproduced in Coriolanus’s scorn of all ‘acclamations hyperbolical’ (I.ix.51), but he goes much farther than that. ‘Sir, praise me not,’ he cuts in curtly when Titus Lartius, a fellow-general, has noted his worthy wounds (I.v.17); and when the entire Roman camp shouts his new name he mutters: ‘I will go wash’ (I.ix.68). He cannot prevent his mother’s praises, for she is a better orator than he, but he can and does insist upon silence from Rome, by whose dignitaries he will not have his ‘nothings monster’d’ (II.ii.81). This is not the modesty of nature or the magnanimity of a man who knows himself. It is bad manners, and it is disruptive of that very social order which Coriolanus claims to consider more important than himself. Modesty in a great man permits him to accept the praise that is due him. Coriolanus’s rejection of praise leaves him still great but leaves him less a man – leaves him, in fact, the ‘lonely dragon’ he says he is (IV.i.30). Honor and responsibility must pay for themselves by being seen. Coriolanus would like to do famous deeds and remain unknown. It is a contradiction in terms, but so is his pride a monster that confounds itself with many contradictions.

‘His nature,’ says Menenius, ‘is too noble for the world’ (III.i.255), but the fault is his as well as the world’s. He can be the world’s servant in only one way, his own (II.i.219), for he is utterly rigid. ‘You are too absolute,’ Volumnia tells him,

Though therein you can never be too noble,

But when extremities speak.

(III.ii.40-1)

The extremity she has in mind is none other than the fate of Rome, and still Coriolanus cannot bring himself to ‘trouble the poor with begging’ (II.iii.76) or to behave as though he were ‘common in my love’ (II.iii.101). He goes to the Forum a second time promising to answer the people mildly; but he mumbles the word ‘mildly’ like a mastiff (III.ii.142-5), and once he is among the ‘common cry of curs’ he bares his teeth and invites the exile which will conduct him to his death. The art of calling names finds him too easily his master; he cannot hold his tongue any more than he can keep his mind from working, and his intelligence tells him many true things.

What custom wills, in all things should we do ‘t,

The dust on antique time would like unswept,

And mountainous error be too highly heapt

For truth to o’er-peer.

(II.iii.125-8)

His intellect, indeed, almost makes him magnificent in his pride. The reasons it cannot do so finally are left for bystanders to state. A shrewd citizen makes one point:

Now, to seem to affect the malice and displeasure of the people is as bad as that which he dislikes, to flatter them for their love.

(II.ii.23-6)

Volumnia makes another,

You might have been enough the man you are,

With striving less to be so.

(III.ii.19-20)

And Aufidius presents the summary:

     Whether ‘t was pride,

Which out of daily fortune ever taints

The happy man; whether defect of judgment,

To fail in the disposing of those chances

Which he was lord of; or whether nature,

Not to be other than one thing, not moving

From the casque to the cushion, but commanding peace

Even with the same austerity and garb

As he controll’d the war; but one of these, –

As he hath spices of them all – not all, –

For I dare so far free him, — made him fear’d;

So, hated; and so, banish’d: but he has a merit

To choke it in the utterance.

(IV.vii.37-49)

This is noble analysis, but the fact that is not especially characteristic of the speaker reminds u s that Shakespeare has been writing the kind of play which needs such anomalies. The kind of play which calls on its characters to say what it means – to do in other words the author’s work – may be admirable, as ‘Coriolanus’ is, but it cannot be attractive. ‘Coriolanus’ remains – a strange thing for Shakespeare – cold, and its hero continues until his death to be a public man whom we are not permitted to know closely enough either for understanding or for love.”

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And finally, from Nuttall:

“In A New Nemesis I suggested that Coriolanus’ ‘I banish you!’ (III.iii.123), hurled back at the citizens as they eject him from the city, is simultaneously an echo of Senecan advice to the stateless (‘Reflect that you are a citizen of the world and cannot be banished from that’) and the angry cry of a stamping four-year old. When Coriolanus’s seeming mastery of himself finally cracks, it is the word ‘boy’ that undoes him (V.vi.103). Aufidius, the half-barbaric Volscian warrior, tells him that he has nothing to do with Mars, the god of war, but is ‘a boy of tears’ (V.vi.100). The words detonate in what is left of Coriolanus’s mind. It is another proto-Freudian moment. Aufidius’s words have their extraordinary effect because they are, at a certain level, true.

Coriolanus belongs with the figures of lesser intelligence that we found in the middle and later tragedies. But, again, this does not mean that the dramatist himself has stopped thinking. I raise, in connection with The Merchant of Venice, the notion that economics or ‘social being’ may determine consciousness. Coriolanus certainly engages, achronically, with Marxian thought, and it is no accident that Bertolt Brecht felt the need to rewrite this play. When the people are starving and ready to revolt, the smooth-talking Menenius silences them with the celebrated ‘fable of the belly’ (I.i.96-160). He explains how there was once a time when the limbs rebelled, claiming that they did all the work and gave the product to the belly, after which the belly unjustly kept everything to itself, but the belly answered the foolish limbs by explaining that it was the storehouse and that all the good things the limbs received came in due course from the belly. The story seems expressly designed to form the target of a Marxian attack. The fundamental question for the Marxist is, ‘Who creates the wealth?’ The usual answer is ‘the Proletariat.’ Here in the play Menenius begins by conceding that the limbs win the bread for the body at the beginning of the process. This can seem to have made nonsense in advance of his later assertion (I.i.152-53) that all the benefits the people receive come to them from the Senators (who correspond to the belly in the fable). His words are doubly offensive when we realize that in any case the Senators are not in fact redistributing the wealth to the starving people. That was what the civil unrest was about in the first place. Obviously Menenius is fobbing them off with an empty tale.

It may be said that to read the scene with this degree of skepticism is not just ‘achronic,’ it is anachronistic and plan wrong; the audience of Shakespeare’s time would have been guided by an instinctive respect for social superiors to accept that Menenius had both refuted and made a fool of the rebellious Plebeian and that the whole notion of ‘fobbing off’ is an exclusively twenty-first-century response. But Shakespeare uses exactly the same phrase at the beginning of the episode: ‘You must not think to fob off our disgrace with a tale’ (I.il.93-94). There is nothing arcane or ‘unavailable-in-1606’ about the idea that the Senators were behaving unjustly. Plutarch himself says that sedition arose because ‘the Senate did favour the riche against the people.’

So far, so Marxist. But what the playwright does next throws the Marxist into confusion. Shakespeare makes a fundamental move on the question, ‘Who creates the wealth?’ Menenius, as we saw, casually conceded at the beginning that the people were the true creators of Rome’s wealth. This notion, however, is gradually destroyed as the play unfolds. Coriolanus, though set at an early period in Roman history, shows us not a primitive agrarian economy but an economy distorted by military success. The wealth is made not by honest ploughmen and reapers but by military campaigns that result in the exaction of tribute from the subjected peoples. Gaius Marcius Coriolanus is clearly upper-class, but he is no parasite on the labor of those socially below him. As a spectacular killer he is himself a primary wealth-creator. The people of Rome, meanwhile, increasingly take on the aspect of an idle mob, as if they were parasitical on the courage of such as Coriolanus. We are told that in battle they proved to be of no use (III.i.122-50). It may be said that we should not believe this, because it is said by Coriolanus, who, though he may indeed be proud, is nowhere given to lying. The ‘bite’ of this Shakespearean character comes from a disturbing coincidence of pride with truth in much of what he says. Plutarch says, apropos of the insurgency, that many of the people exhibited terrible wounds to show what they had done for Rome, but Shakespeare suppresses this. His populace is hungry but without honorable scars.

If the people are in truth parasitic, does this make Menenius’s fable, after all, cogent? Is the complacent conservative who rejoices in his victory over the poor citizen proved essentially right by what follows? The answer, surely, is no. To read in this way is to flatten the play with its lurching momentum into a flat monotone. Shakespeare first creates a skeptical space around the seemingly duplicitous Menenius and then has fun working against the grain of the skepticism he created. That is Shakespeare’s way.

Volumnia stands behind all. If we think of her as a woman interested only in the exercise of power, she is a sad failure. She has failed to understand how Rome is ceasing to be a place of simple bellicose values and is becoming a complex society, with an interest in the new ‘cooperative values.’ Having constructed a warrior, she finds that she needs a politician. Coriolanus, we can see at once, was not built for electioneering. But the speech on the breasts of Hecuba with which we began suggests a darker, more primary drive in Volumnia, a lusting for death. And in this she succeeds, for Coriolanus is a tragedy, and the tragedy is largely of her making, just as the tragedy of Othello was largely of Iago’s making. Iago is the ‘male best friend’ who desires your destruction. Volumnia is the mother who at a certain level is working to a like end. Of course she does not contrive the catastrophe of the play, but we have learned by now to ask Marxian questions about deep causes – not, this time, ‘Who creates the wealth?’ but ‘Who creates death?’ the answer is, the mother.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkOd0pOgwUE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9med_5PV6lw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vugacjbKOBs

Our next reading:  Coriolanus, Act Four

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

Coriolanus

Act Four, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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For your Thanksgiving week enjoyment, an interview with Ralph Fiennes from the book Shakespeare on Stage, talking about his 2007 stage performance.  I find it fascinating to get an actor’s take on the role, as opposed to say an academic or literary critic – they’re the ones who have to figure out a way to bring that particular character to life on stage and to have his/her motivations make sense to the audience.

You’ve played plenty of the great Shakespearean parts. What’s special about Coriolanus?

It’s an odd role for me. I did it paired with Richard II, always a part I’d had my eye on. Jonathan Kent suggested a double bill with Coriolanus. There’s no particular connection between the plays, except they’re both about people who aspire to power and abuse it. They can’t handle it, and fuck it up. And I just became obsessed with this man. He’s one of the hardest characters to like, I think. The play is like a horrendous, uncompromising cliff face. It doesn’t have any of the warm, human, lyrical moments that you associate with Shakespeare. It seems to be a relentlessly uncompromising, jagged piece. Likewise, he is this peculiar, twisted, repressed machine. He’s pulped and conditioned, malformed by his mother. But I love the anger in it. And he has this aspiration to unbending purity. It can be repellent and fascist, but it’s also…he’s trying to be something distilled. I think it is a real tragedy. And interestingly, most people I spoke to seemed to dislike him initially, and then feel he is the victim of political manipulation and Machiavellian intrigue. Which he is – he’s manipulated by the tribunes, by the people.

It’s one of Shakespeare’s most political plays, and it’s had very diverse interpretations.

Well, I can see all those things. We were more interested in the psychology of what happened between him and his mother Volumnia, which Barbara Jefford played, to make him what he was. Jonathan and I agreed that although he’s full of pride, and there is a kind of vanity, I suppose, in the end he’s got a set of rules he’s determined to live by. They’re rules that she has created, and she has brought him up by them. We were interested in why he was like he was. So the emphasis was on that relationship, and it was not political at all. I think you say ‘Here is the man and you judge, you decide what you think.’

Did you have any particular influences, any particular way of preparing for it, any modern resonances that came to your mind? War heroes are not very fashionable these days. Suicide bombers are more topical, aren’t they?

I remember feeling that the physicality of soldiers is very important. They’re very held, they don’t like giving anything away. I tried to show the repression, and that military thing of being conditioned. It’s in lots of modern films, American films about soldiers going to West Point. You see that sort of mask that comes into play. I don’t necessarily think it’s sexy, it’s a male way of being, a particular code. It’s Samurai-like: ‘There is only one way and this is the say, and I will never deviate from this path and I’m prepared to go to my death to defend the way of the code, the code of honor, this is the way.’ And I looked at a lot of paintings – Victorian paintings of soldiers in uniform, holding themselves very taut – with the designer Paul Brown. I remember a discussion about the tunic. Actually it felt a bit too heavy in the end. If you look at those paintings of warriors, they’re very interesting. That was my thing. I’ve got a whole load of postcards of paintings from those incredibly proud Renaissance princes to the era of Velazquez’s Philip II, and onwards. The way men have themselves portrayed with their virility and pride.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the play. Before you come on you’re described [1.1] as ‘chief enemy to the people,’ and ‘a very dog to the commonality,’ etc. You then arrive and immediately start haranguing these poor hungry citizens. It’s as if the mere sight of a plebeian is enough to set you off. Why this high-octane abuse as soon as you walk onstage?

Well, first of all, they are rioting, and he doesn’t know them. This is his weakness: his ignorance, there’s no question. But as the actor you have to find his vision of the world, which is that these people are wanting to be fed, yet when the chips are down they won’t go to war. And that’s how Shakespeare writes them, buckling and running.

But they’re not soldiers – not everyone’s a soldier.

Yes. But I suppose in Shakespeare’s time very few people were. Now we have professional soldiers, which then was probably less the case.

So in those days they would all have been expected to turn out, would they?

Well, I’m guessing this, but I think probably at that time you were mustered for armies. The concept of the professional soldier hardly existed. There were trained mercenaries, famously, in the Thirty Years War. But really a nation’s army was its people. Anyway, I think that no one in the audience would know that, it’s a programme note. The point is, I suppose, he’s decided that they are fickle. His haranguing of them is because they just don’t stand up. They’re not what the Americans call ‘stand-up men.’ When the going’s good, fine. But when they have to confront, they won’t do it. Coriolanus’s attitude of course is not a good one, because they are hungry people. But he’s prepared to die. He’s absolutely prepared to die. The way he lays into them probably makes him unattractive, but it’s what he feels. ‘I am prepared to go into battle. I am prepared to die, and I don’t think any of you are.’

That’s why I asked if you thought there was anything of a suicide bomber in his outlook.

Yes, I’m sure there is.

It’s all for the cause?

I also think he’s unhappy. He’s longing for the release. There’s a release, there’s an ecstasy in battle. I don’t think his mother showed him any affection. It’s all to do with that. I think he’s a deeply disturbed man. If you create someone like that, of course he can go the distance, but he’s emotionally dried up. He’s not emotionally intelligent, because of how he’s been made. I think the audience understand him more as the play goes on. Initially they think ‘What?’ Dramatically, it’s a piece of strong writing to have a man come in and go ‘You fucking scum, you should do it like this. Hang ‘em, hang’em, hang ‘em. Fuck off, hang ‘em!’ But later I think there’s a chance that you can understand, when you see the way his mother manipulates him in Act 3. She says ‘Go back to the people and he goes. I think he’s like…you know when horses are trained very specifically to be ridden a certain way, if you give them a wrong instruction they hate it. I always thought he was like a horse. His mother said go back, and he went.

It’s interesting that at the end of the first scene, when you smell military action, you’re transformed. You’re a different person. You’re energized and positive in a way that you haven’t been before. There’s a line about venting ‘our musty superfluity.’ I wonder whether that is a collective thing about the plebs or whether it’s personal – the reason for your spleen on your first entrance…

Inaction. I hadn’t thought of that, that’s very good.

…kicking your heels and becoming splenetic.

Well, even if he says it about the other people, a psychiatrist might say that it’s really about himself.

If you’re not onstage, you’re being talked about. Which is nice, isn’t it, because it does part of your job for you, I suppose.

It’s quite an exhausting part. When you read it, you think you have free time. At first I thought ‘Oh fine, there’ll be little rests, it’s not like a Richard or a Hamlet.’ But actually when you’re off, you’re changing or you’re paring. You come on and have quite a big scene sneering at the people, saying ‘Hang ‘em!’ and giving a litany of reasons why they rare repulsive. Then you go off and there’s a gap in which you are changing or getting ready for the battle scene. After that it’s relentless. I felt I had to bring that adrenalin of a man going to war. There’s the siege of Corioli (1.4), there’s the cursing of his own soldiers, the going in, the coming back out. You feel as an actor that you must be pumped for this to be convincing.

‘Fiennes displays a ferocious ecstasy as he runs into the very jaws of death.’

So Coriolanus takes the city and then he goes to help Cominius, the other Roman general, his superior. He arrives covered in blood, saying, ‘Come I too late? Come I too late?’ [1.6]. Cominius says ‘You must rest.’ He says ‘no, we mustn’t rest, we must go on.’ And he has this wonderful speech like a mini Henry V moment, where he says to the soldiers: ‘If any such be here…that love this painting/Wherein you see me smear’d…’ He gets them all shouting and waving their swords, and then he goes off again into battle. And we’re still in Act I! So that in terms of theatre energy, you’ve done more fighting in the first act than in other plays happens at the end. You have expended massive amounts of adrenalin. He gathers the soldiers to him in that one moment.

‘O me alone! Make you a sword of me! he says [1/6]/

I adore that line.

You lingered lovingly on the phrase Why was it so special to you?

I felt it was a moment of self-definition, of self-realization. ‘Yes, I’ll do it on my own, on my own.’ It was like ‘This is what I am. I’ll be the perfect sword.’

A real ‘raison d’etre.’

Yes. Cominius says ‘Take your choice of those/That best can aid your action.’ He replies:

     Those are they

That most are willing. If any such be here –

As it were sin to doubt – that love this painting

Wherein you see me smear’d, if any fear

Lesser his person than an ill report,

If any think brave death outweighs bad life

And that his country’s dearer than himself,

Let him alone, or so many so minded,

Wave thus to express his disposition,

And follow Martius.

Then they all shout and wave their swords and take him up in their arms and cast up their caps. He says ‘O, me alone! Make you a sword of me!’ It was an ecstatic moment of a man doing all he does best, and being acknowledged for it by his soldiers. We cut the rest of the speech, because he then goes into this funny qualification which is difficult to follow. And it sort of dwindles away.

After the victory, you request freedom for ‘a poor man’…

A great moment.

…then you forget his name.

Yeah, that’s fantastic.

It’s quite out of charaer, isn’t it?

Well, that’s what I love about it. There are these little moments where you glimpse this other person that he could have been. He’s gone into the city, and at one moment in this horrendous act of violence – he was probably killing people and being wounded – and out of the blue a figure came up and shielded him, or he ran into some Volscian shopkeeper’s store and this little man gave him a glass of water. This is what I imagined for myself. He suddenly had this bit of simple humanity. Afterwards he just remembered. And I think that’s the genius. You say it’s out of character, but then, well, what are our characters? People think we’re one thing, and then we say or do something, and they go ‘Oh, I didn’t think that’s like you!’ But it is me.

There aren’t many moments in the part that surprise you like that.

No, there aren’t. As an actor you leap on that moment.

He’s terribly bad at receiving praise. ‘No more of this, it does offend my heart,’ he says [2.1] He won’t receive praise and he won’t show his wounds to the people Why not? You know it’s the custom. Why won’t he let them see his wounds?

I’ve done the work, why should I? I feel like that with journalists. I’ve done the work, why should I talk about it? ‘Well you know I fought in the battle, why should I prostitute myself?’ It’s like a prostitution for him. Flaunting. ‘Why should I flaunt these things for you? I’ve actually put myself on the line.’

It’s a matter of pride.

Yeah, pride.

It involved having an intimate relationship with people you think are beneath you, isn’t that it.

I suppose so. For me it was more like ‘Why should I be a commodity, why should I display my wounds in order to get your votes?’ I guess that’s pride, but in his head it’s ‘I’ve done it. I have taken Corioli. I have the name.’ It’s true, he is proud, he doesn’t want to talk to them about it. He makes little noises. ‘I have wounds to show you, which shall be yours in private,’ he says (2.3). Whatever that means. It means ‘I won’t ever do it.’

He’s supposed to share his wounds with the people at large. And there’s this whole episode about the gown of humility, whether he’s going to put it on or not. It’s kind of comic in a way. But it makes you wonder how much he actually wants to be consul, because the gown is also part of the deal.

I think he really wants it.

Why?

Power. Prestige. But much as they’re manipulating him, I think they’re right when they say that he shouldn’t be consul. He’s totally unpolitical, he’s contemptuous of the whole body of the state, the people. He’s like an ambitious little child wanting the top prize. It’s power and prestige, it’s position and it’s the highest honor.

Professor Antony Clare wrote a note in your programme saying ‘From a psychiatrist’s point of view, pride is often a mask to cover up a deep-seated insecurity.

Yes, I think that’s right. It goes back to the whole mother thing I was trying to explain. That the pride was a layer, a carapace to protect him. I saw something I wish I’d done. I was watching Alan Howard in the BBC TV production (which you feel is made on a shoestring, to its detriment really). But he does this wonderful thing when he’s talking to the people. He simply doesn’t know how to talk to them, when he asks for their voices. I think I played it a bit too much on the note of a sneer, a sort of ‘You reptiles’ tone. But when I saw Alan, after I’d played the part, I thought it was really interesting, because he actually didn’t know how to form a sentence to these people. It seems like contempt, and it partially is contempt, because that’s the only thing he’s been trained to feel for them. But a man comes up to him and says ‘Why are you standing here?’ Alan did it brilliantly. He said ‘Well…you know the reason why I’m standing here.’ There was something slightly hesitant and held at the same time.

But, he has no people skills at all, and that’s basically why he couldn’t hack it, isn’t it. It’s so interesting at the beginning of Act 3, Scene I, everything seems to be fine. He’s been given the vote for the consulship and he’s got Aufidius in his sights. Then he meets the tribunes and just flies off the handle. He’s totally self-destructive, isn’t he? He’s his own worst enemy.

I know that in my rational, balanced, Guardian-reading way, that what he says is repulsive. He’s not electable. But dramatically I just love his uncompromising attitude, his imagery of ‘Bring in/The crows to peck the eagles.’ He has these wonderful speeches. He obviously hates the idea of any kind of unrest. He says, about letting the tribunes have any sway:

     …and my soul aches

To know, when two authorities are up,

Neither supreme, how soon confusion

May enter ‘twist the gap of both, and take

The one by th’ other.

Then he argues at length about giving a voice to the people, what harm it does, and he concludes with:

     Thus we debase

The nature of our seats and make the rabble

Call our cares fears, which will in time

Break ope the locks o’th’senate, and bring in

The crows to peck the eagles.

Isn’t that great stuff?

And you see his vision that the patrician establishment rules the best. They keep the strength, they keep the solidity, they keep the power, and Rome and survive with this hierarchy. But if we allow this little middle road of debate and the people’s voice, it’s the way to unrest. It’s not something I personally feel, but it’s great to play. And actually, in this fucking New Labour world of spin, I’m getting more intolerant. I like to hear the voice of ‘Get out of the way, let’s speak it how it is.’ I loved it when a couple of army officers said Tony Blair should be impeached for what he’s done. I love it when people speak out. The press go ‘Oh, Sir General Downing should have never said the army is in a bad state…’ Well, good for him for saying it.

I wonder whether there’s a problem for a modern actor in terms of the part being very much to do with heroism, but we don’t have superheroes these days. Also because of films and TV, grand-scale acting is not current. Was that a problem?

What’s a real problem is that his anger is so often talked about, and the way he flips into white-hot rage so quickly. The challenge of the part is finding the gradations and moments of subtlety, nuance. So much of what he says about the people is quite repetitive. He goes into the marketplace, wearing the gown of humility. He starts in a rather obtuse, ironic, contemptuous tone, all in prose. Then he segues into verse, saying ‘Why should I stand here begging? I deserve this!’ But then suddenly he switches and decides to play it right down the line, like ‘Right! I am doing it. I’ve said I would hate to do it, I would despise myself for doing it because I don’t see I need to. But fuck it, I’m gonna do it.’ And he does it. ‘Your voices! For your voices I have fought,/Watch’d for your voices’ Bang bang bang bang. Menenius comes in and says ‘Right, you’ve done it, now it’s fine.’ So it’s done.

But then in the following scene [3.1] he’s confronted by the tribunes who say ‘You haven’t done it correctly. You didn’t ask for the people’s voices with enough humility, so you have to do it again.’ And he goes mad at this, he says ‘I have done it!’ And he has done it. So he has this extended moment of building rage. It can be quite funny because everyone says to him ‘Come, enough.’ ‘Enough, with over-measure.’ He says ‘No, take more.’ They go ‘Has said enough.’ But he goes on and on and on. He keeps going on and on, it’s relentless. The language is very difficult, and the rhetorical arguments that Shakespeare give him are tortuous. But I loved playing it, it was a wonderful…[Ralph makes Wild Western shot-out sounds and gestures.] The rage just builds and goes on and goes on. You have to keep topping yourself and topping yourself and topping yourself. And within that, not let it become a shout or a rant, but keep the arguments at high octane, and keep inventing. On a good night, at some kind of speed, it really seemed to work. Jonathan always said to me, if you take time to lay everything out clearly, you can lose it. I remember trying to find the right balance, because you can sometimes overspeed, and then you also feel you’ve lost it. To keep the argument active and present, and the rage building without it becoming too extreme, that was the hardest thing. So it was quite athletic, vocally and emotionally.

Another review said ‘Rarely can a leading actor have strained so little to attract sympathy. No charismatic histrionics, but a portrait of the killing machine as schoolboy cipher, stamping his feet like a spoilt child when he meets resistance from his mother.’  Tell me about that moment.

It’s in the next scene [3.2], where Volumnia persuades me to go back again to the people. She says ‘Go to them, with this bonnet in thy hand…’ It became one of those things that was funny when I first did it, and then it got a bit over-heavy. ‘Look, mother, I’m going…[Stomping feet.’] Yaahhhhh! [Making a face and putting his thumbs in his ears.[ Well, it wasn’t quite that extreme. But he becomes the little boy saying ‘I’m going, look! You told me to go and I’m going. Here, you see, I’m going, Okay? Are you happy now?’ I remember that with my own mother, she’d say, ‘Go and tidy your room. You go and do this.’ And I’d say ‘I’ve done my room, look. Look, it’s all done. Can you see? Are you happy now? My bed, is it good enough for you?’ It was that sort of thing.

So back he goes, and immediately there’s the final flare-up.

I think it’s all part of the spiral of what’s happened. His own emotions and temper have taken him to the first confrontation with the tribunes, then back to the mother. ‘Go back to the people,’ she says, ‘speak softly to them.’ So he goes back again to the people, and says, ‘Plant love among’s,/Throng our large temples with the shows of peace…’ etc. [3.3] But then they say ‘You’re a traitor.’ A TRAITOR???!!! That’s when he goes off like a machine gun – ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!’ – ‘You common cry of curs…’ And he loses it:

     I banish you!

And here remain with your uncertainty!

And in the heat of the moment he says:

     Despising,

For you, the city, thus I turn my back,

There is a world elsewhere.

So we depart to go into exile [4.1]. As you say goodbye to your family, you seem at your most informal and relaxed, almost happy. It’s odd, isn’t it. Because you’ve just been banished from Rome, and apparently you don’t know where you’re going.

I don’t think he does. It all happens in the moment. There’s no planning. I think there’s a release in him, a huge release. There’s a huge sense of ‘I’m getting out of here.’ It’s not necessarily a conscious thought. And talking lf laugh lines, there’s the one about six of Hercules’ tasks. He says to his mother as he goes, trying to cheer her up:

       Nay, mother,

Resume that spirit, when you were wont to say,

If you had been the wife of Hercules,

Six of his labors you’d have done, and sav’d

Your husband so much sweat.

Yes, he’s on the move. They would pick him out, he’s going to be killed. So it’s a hurried farewell on the corner of some street. I remember playing it quite fast. ‘Goodbye. Yes, yes, come on. Bye. Don’t sorry, don’t worry…’

Arriving in Antium, you say ‘My birthplace Hate I, and my love’s upon/This enemy town.’ [4.4] Your defection seems very abrupt. For other parts, in other plays, Shakespeare might have written a soliloquy showing a spiritual crisis, the inner turmoil that leads into that statement. But there’s nothing like that. Do you think it’s underwritten, or is it appropriate for Coriolanus?

I found a new vocal placement for this scene. Having earlier been ‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!’, suddenly here he is Antium, and he’s covered up. But I think he’s someone who relishes a feeling and then says it. ‘My birthplace hate I, and my love’s upon/This enemy town.’

He’s not a Hamlet, not a cogitator.

No, I don’t think he is. But he registers that he might be killed there, doesn’t he. And actually he does have a couple of bits of cogitation just before that. He says:

       many an heir

Of these fair edifices ‘fore my wars

Have I heard grown and drop. Then know me not,

Lest that thy wives with spits, and boys with stones,

In puny battle slay me.

And then:

 O, world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,

Whose double bosoms seem to wear one heart,

Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise

Are still together, who twin, as ‘twere, in love

Unseparable, shall within this hour,

On the dissension of a doit, break out

To bitterest enmity.

That’s a reflection on the world. It’s not really depicting personal inner turmoil.

He recognizes the capriciousness of everything – it’s all just turned in a moment.

So you go over to Aufidius, and seem quite calm on the surface.

It’s funny, that speech (4.5). It’s incredibly controlled and articulate, telling Aufidius why he’s here. ‘I’m ready to die.’ It has a formal clarity, and it’s more accessible than many other speeches with all the raging stuff. His mind is very clear, with the clarity of hatred.

It’s a long speech and for nearly forty lines Aufidius doesn’t react. Shakespeare doesn’t give him anything to say.

Well, Coriolanus is here in front of him, out of the blue. I think he hears him, and he’s annoyed. And the speech has a clear line running through it.

Menenius says ‘He and Aufidius can no more atone/Than violent’st contrariety’ (4.6). In spite of that it does seem to be remarkably easy for that alliance to be formed. Does he expect it to be so easy?

He doesn’t know what to expect, but he knows exactly what he’s going to say. ‘I hate Rome, it’s betrayed me. I want to destroy my country. If you wish to use my skill against Rome, so be it. If not, kill me.’ It’s very, very, very simple.

Aufidius says earlier that Coriolanus is ‘Bolder, though not so subtle.’ (1.10), which is accurate, isn’t it?

It’s true yes. that relationship is very interesting. Aufidius has intense hatred and envy of Coriolanus, but when they meet he uses language almost of infatuation.

A homoerotic relationship?

I think that’s there. We didn’t play it as full-on as we might have done. But it was there. Linus Roache played Aufidius, and he definitely indicated that. He behaves like a betrayed lover. And he’s vicious, he is…vicious.

When the play was done at Nottingham in the 1960s, with John Neville as Coriolanus and Ian McKellen as Aufidius, it was apparently an overtly homosexual relationship. But you didn’t go that far, I take it.

It depends on what you mean by ‘overt.’ In our production there was clenching and hugging and touching.

When you fight in Act I?

That’s right, yeah. There was a moment when we held each other and looked (1.8). But I don’t think we ever wanted to sledgehammer home overt homosexuality, it was about intimacy and proximity…

But after you defect, Aufidius is speculating as to why you couldn’t carry on as a noble servant of Rome (4.7). He says ‘Whether ‘twas pride…whether defect of judgement…or whether [inflexibility in] not moving/From th’ casque to th’ cushion…’

‘…but commanding peace/Even with the same austerity and garb/As he controll’d the war.’

Do you think it’s any of those things in particular, or all of them?

I think it’s a bit of everything.

Going on to Act 5. When your wife and son and mother come in, even before they arrive you say ‘Shall I be tempted to infringe my vow/In the same time ‘tis made? I will not.’ (5.3). It rather sounds as if you will! And then before they speak you say ‘I melt, and am not/Of stronger earth than others.’ So the vacillation is evident.

I found it very hard to know the pitch of this stuff. He has his asides which are odd, because they describe what the audience is seeing: ‘My wife comes foremost, then the honour’d mould…I melt…My mother bows..’ I found the formality of it quite difficult.  He kneels, she kneels, he raises her. And this strange character of Valeria. It’s an odd formal meeting of the three women coming to Coriolanus, in which Shakespeare gives him these funny little descriptions of his inner state, which are hard to pull off. Then the idea that Volumnia has knelt to him. He says:

     What’s this?

Your knees to me? To your corrected son?

The let the pebbles on the hungry beach

Fillip the stars. Then let the mutinous winds

Strike the proud cedars ‘gainst the fiery sun,

Murd’ring impossibility, to make

What cannot be, slight work.

The idea that she would ever kneel to him ‘murders impossibility.’

Strong stuff.

But it’s hard to play. You can feel the audience going ‘What’s happening?’ The scene sags. It seems to kick in when he says:

     I beseech you, peace!

Or if you’d ask, remember this before:

The thing I have forsworn to grant may never

Be held by you denials. Do not bid me

Dismiss my soldiers or capitulate

Again with Rome’s mechanics. Tell me not

Wherein I seem unnatural. Desire not

T’allay my rages and revenges with

Your colder reasons.

‘Don’t do this, don’t tell me this!’

Nonetheless, from the moment of their entrance you feel he’s going to be won over.

I think the audience genuinely doesn’t know his feelings. The tension is that they shouldn’t.

In Harley Granville Barber’s Preface to Coriolanus he says ‘Coriolanus is no renegade; his striving to be false to Rome is false to himself.’

Yeah, he hates it. He knows he’s false to himself. I think you can feel the conflict in him. He sees his mother and says:

    But out, affection!

All bond and privilege of nature break!

Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.

Then:

     I’ll never

Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand

As if a man were author of himself,

And knew no other kin.

But that’s not the way he carries through the scene, is it.

No, that’s what I’m saying. It helps the audience to not know. If they followed those little asides, they really don’t know. And when Volumnia starts her long speech, they still don’t know where it’s going to go. I think not all elements of our production worked, by any means. But you know that great moment when a Shakespeare play cuts to the chase – it cuts to what everything’s been building towards – and you feel the audience catch fire? It was like that. She’s going on and on, and he’s not giving in, and he’s not giving in. And then the collapse.

There’s a stage direction about silent hand-holding…

‘Holds her by the hand, silent.’ We did that. I love that stage direction. Just as a sentence it’s wonderful. The main thing for me in the play was the relationship with the mother. Barbara turned to walk away from me, and as she turned I grabbed her. She stopped and I went to pieces, fell to my knees, so I was looking up at her. There’s the line:

     What have you done?…

But for your son, believe it, O, believe it,

Most dangerously you have with him previl’d,

If not most mortal to him.

Meaning ‘You know what you’ve done? I’m going to die.’ And she had this look as if to say – actually it would have been great in close-up – as if to say ‘Yeah, I know.’

But she’s happy with that, isn’t she? She’s got no problem with you dying, as long as you die gloriously.

Yes yes, she can live with that. She says earlier on ‘Had I a dozen sons…I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action’ (1.3)

You had a tremendously affecting breakdown.

I saw it as a breakdown. I hope I didn’t overextend it as the production went on, but I remember that I ended up on the floor literally trying to pull myself together. And to face Aufidius, who’s looking down disdainfully at Coriolanus in tears. I had a great line: ‘Would you have heard/A mother less? Or granted less, Aufidius?’ And he just says, with a sneer, ‘I was mov’d withal.’

What is it that makes you so emotional at that moment?

I don’t know. It felt like a huge release that I’ve never really examined. It’s like a little boy pleading with his mother in the most open, innocent way. ‘Mummy, Mummy, please don’t do that, Mummy, please say it’s okay…’ it’s the little boy pleading with his mother on the most basic, most simple most childish level. I think that’s what’s moving.

Tell me how you died.

I went back to Tullus Aufidius bearing a formal presentation (5.6):

     We have made peace

With no less honor to the Antiates

Than shame to th’Romans…

‘Were all fine.’ Then he starts. He calls me ‘thou boy of tears.’ He insults me to the point where I have the final Coriolanian explosion:

If you have write your annals true, ‘tis there,

That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles.

Alone I did it. ‘Boy!’

So he throws the insult back at Aufidius. And then everybody says ‘He killed my son!’ ‘My daughter!’ ‘He killed my father!’ And I was grabbed from behind by Volscian soldiers, in cruciform, and had my throat cut.

By Aufidius?

Yes. He came up to me and did it.

Would you like to play it again?

Yeah.

Would you change it much, do you think, if you played it again?

Yes, I would. But I’m reticent to talk about it, it’s too early. [In 2010, Fiennes played Coriolanus again, this time on film, also marking his directorial debut.]

It’s quoted as the tragedy of a man whose moral and psychological failings bring about his downfall. Does that seem accurate?

Yeah, that’s right. I see it as a tragedy of some little boy being made into only one thing, with this rigid attitude. Rigidity snaps, whereas if you’ve got any fluidity, you have more chance of surviving. There’s a whole mass of experience he’s never been allowed to have. So he becomes this rigid think, he can only be a sword. ‘O me alone! Make you a sword of me!’

————————————-

Your thoughts?

Our next reading:  Act Five of Coriolanus

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And have a terrific Thanksgiving weekend!

Coriolanus

Act Five, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

———————————————————–

Act Five:  Meanwhile, Rome is desperate to win back its savior, so first Cominius, then Menenius, are sent out to persuade Coriolanus to return. Both fail, but Virgilia, Volumnia, Valeria and Young Martius make a final plea, to which Coriolanus at least gives in, fully aware of the danger it puts him in. While Rome celebrates the news, Aufidius accuses Coriolanus of treachery (understandably so) and the Volscians demand his head. The end has indeed come. Coriolanus is at first stabbed to death, then trampled by the Volscian crowd. Aufidius, weeping at what he has done, orders him to be buried with full military honors.

——

Let’s look at this again:  Coriolanus and Aufidius’s forces are sitting outside Rome, ready to destroy it, while the tribunes send out envoys desperately pleading with Coriolanus to spare the city.  Coriolanus though remains unmoved. “He does sit in gold,” Cominius stammers, “his eye/Red as ‘twould burn Rome” (5.1.63-4), and the only way the city’s elders can see to save themselves it to send out the women closes to Coriolanus: Valeria, Virgilia, and of course his beloved Volumnia (along with his son Young Martius). Despite Coriolanus’s insistence that they should not try “t’allay/My rages and revenges with your colder reasons” (5.3.85-6), over the course of an extraordinarily long (and moving) scene of pleading – in every way the probable climax of the play – he is eventually persuaded to back down. Though earlier he tried to claim that he stood isolated, “As if a man were author of himself/And knew no other kin” (5.3.36-7), the hero is forced to recognize that his family cannot so easily be disowned. But his acceptance comes with dark foreboding. “O mother, mother!” he cries, holding her hand in a striking symbol of empathy,

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at. O my mother, mother, O!

You have won a happy victory to Rome;

But for your son, believe it, O believe it,

Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,

If not most mortal to him.

(5.3.163-90)

(Of course, keep in mind Volumnia’s avowal back in Act One, that “I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.”)

“But let it come,” he bravely concludes, and with that he knows (and we know) that his fate is sealed. Although he give in to Volumnia’s pleas (did he really have any choice?), her earlier lesson that “Thy valiantness was mine, thou sucked’st it from me” (3.2.128) proves more enduring.

By this time we know Aufidius jealously believes that Coriolanus is, as his own servants, snigger, “The greater soldier” (4.5.170), and is busy plotting his rival’s downfall. Characteristically though, Coriolanus beats him to the punch. Angrily denying that the tears of his family – what Aufidius sneeringly calls “certain drops of salt” (5.6.95) have weakened his resolve, Coriolanus angrily turns upon the Volscians once again. Aufidius’s taunt that he is nothing but a “boy of tears” proves the end. “Cut me to pieces, Volsces,” Coriolanus cries, commanding even his own death:

Stain all your edges on me. ‘Boy’! False hound,

If you have writ your annals true, ‘tis there

That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.

Alone I did it.

(5.6.112-6)

And the crowd, clutching knives, surges forward. Coriolanus is “alone” for the last time.

——————————————————-

From Garber:

“Thus, by the time Cominius comes to plead with him, and is turned away, Coriolanus has been established as a man explicitly without a name, without a human identity, rejecting, by this time, even the surname. ‘Yet one time did he call me by my name,’ Cominius reports,

I urged our old acquaintance and the drops

That we have bled together. ‘Coriolanus’

He would not answer to, forbade all names.

He was a kind of nothing, titleless,

Till he had forged himself a name o’th’ fire

Of burning Rome.

(5.1.9-15)

The log here is unassailable, and devastating. What kind of cognomen could be given to the Roman conqueror of Rome? It would be a political oxymoron, a pointed self-contradiction.

Characteristically, with his usual charming obtuseness, Menenius pleads from the other extreme, claiming exactly the kind of name that Coriolanus has forbidden – ‘thy old father, Menenius’ – and referring to him as ‘my son Coriolanus’ (5.2.67,, 62). These are names that have been long rejected, long abandoned as too painful and too vulnerable. As if to underscore the point, Shakespeare provides a comic tableau in which Menenius boasts to the Volscian watchmen about the power of his own name: ‘My name hath touched, your ears; it is Menenius.’ ‘Be it so,’ replies the First Watchman, ‘go back. The virtue of your name/Is not here pass able.’ (5.2.13-15). ‘Menenius’ is not a password or watchword. After his embassy is rejected, the Watch has its revenge; addressing him with elephantine irony: ‘Now, sir, is your name Menenius?’ and ‘’Tis a spell, you see, of much power.’

Yet when the plea comes from his mother, Coriolanus will reverse himself. Her argument, significantly, is not based initially on kinship, but explicitly – like son, like mother – on name and reputation. She picks up the conundrum introduced by Coriolanus – What kind of name could be awarded to the Roman who defeats his home city? – and offers an answer from history:

[I]f thou conquer Rome, the benefit

Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name

Whose chronicle thus writ: ‘The man was noble,

But with his last attempt he wiped it out,

Destroyed his country, and his name remains

To th’ ensuing age abhorred…

(5.3.143-149)

His new addition as conqueror of Rome will be one that makes his name abhorred, hated in later times. Artfully she leads her son from this vision of the future to the true name she wishes instead to provide for him, the name that will be the hallmark and password of his destruction. ‘Speak to me, son./…Why dost not speak?/…Daughter speak you,/…Speak thou, boy./…There’s no man in the world/More bound to’s mother.’ (5.3, 149, 154, 156, 157, 159-160). She, using only kinship terms and not names, urges speech, and then, encountering only stubborn (and defensive) silence, she chooses gesture:

Down, ladies. Let us shame him with our knees.

…………………………………………

This fellow had a Volscian to his mother.

His wife is in Corioles, and his child

Like him by chance. – Yet give us our dispatch.

I am hushed until our city be afire,

And then I’ll speak a little.

(5.3.170, 179-183)

It is this rebuke, and this invitation, that leads him to hold her ‘by the hand, silent,’ and seal his own doom. His name has been Caius Martius, and Coriolanus. He has been a man of no name, a figure out of romance, wandering in ragged clothes, incognito, seeking to find himself. But the self he finally finds, the name he finally accepts, is not the surname Coriolanus, but the name of a man bound to his mother. The name of a tragic hero whose time has come.

Aufidius, envious and politic, presides over this final stripping, which will leave the hero nameless in yet another sense, taking away from him all the additions, the names and titles and roles, that have cushioned and protected him from the world:

Aufidius:

[T]ell the traitor in the highest degree

He hath abused your powers.

Coriolanus:

Traitor? How now?

Aufidius:

Ay, traitor, Martius.

Coriolanus:

Martius?

Aufidius:

Ay, Martius, Caius Martius, Dost thou think

I’ll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol’n name,

‘Coriolanus’ in Corioles?

It is probably safe to say that this is a nicety that has escaped Coriolanus, the idea that his nickname might give offense to those whose city he had conquered. But far worse – the worst – is yet to come:

Aufidius:

[A]t his nurse’s tears [he tells the

Roman commoners]

He whined and roared away your victory.

………………………

Coriolanus:

Hear’st thou, Mars?

Aufidius:

Name not the god, thou boy of tears.

(5.6.99-100, 102-103)

Not Mar’s man, Martius, but ‘boy’ – his first name and his final name, a name so truly given and so wounding in spirit that Coriolanus can do nothing but repeat it in disbelief: ‘Boy’? O slave!’

Coriolanus:

‘Boy’! False hound,

If you have write your annals true, ‘tis there,

That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.

Alone I did it. ‘Boy’!

The traditional belief in many cultures, that when you know someone’s real name you have power over them, is enacted here in this drama, this tragedy of the name. In reaffirming the filial bond, in giving in to his mother’s plea, and to the voice(s) of Rome in her voice, Caius Martius Coriolanus find his fate, his name, and his death. For the death that overtakes him resembles the sparagmos of ancient Greek tragedy, the ritual tearing to pieces of the tragic hero, the sacrificial victim. ‘Tear him to pieces! Do it presently!’ (that is, right away) cry the people, and the conspirators set upon him and kill him. The literal dismemberment of his body fulfills and completes the verbal imagery of fragmented body parts that began with the fable of the belly and has continues throughout the play. Around him men now begin to speak of his tale, his annals, his chronicle, his fame, and his noble memory – the record of his public achievements that is equivalent in Shakespeare to the action and events of the play itself. It is arguable that his most signal achievement is that he has marched in with the people, recognizing, for a brief moment, his identity with collective humanity. But, with the death of Coriolanus, the ‘boy of tears,’ something else dies as well, for in bringing together the two key concepts of name and silence, Coriolanus – both the man and the play – has knotted together two central strands of Shakespearean tragedy.

Over and over again in these plays we have seen one common gesture, the gesture of reaching, as if across an abyss, from one world to another, in affirmation – against all costs – of a human bond of pain and love. Desdemona, murdered by Othello and hidden behind the bed curtains, speaks out of the silence of death, and speaks in words of love: ‘Commend me to my kind lord.’ Antony, fooled and betrayed into taking his own life, is hauled up to the monument of Cleopatra, and he dies with words to his lover: ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying.’ Cordelia, expelled from her father’s kingdom because of her own loving silence, hears him reach out to her from something very like death – ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave’ – and Cordelia, too, rejects the idea of guilt, blame, or recrimination: ‘No cause, no cause.’ In Coriolanus we are offered that magical and tragic and transcendent emotion between mother and son, in which he ‘holds her by the hand, silent,’ and once again the silence tells all.

In a way, all of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are in search of names – in search of their own hidden names, which will also be their deaths. They seek reputation, public name, but ultimately they all seek private names as well. ‘This is I,/Hamlet the Dane,’ cries Hamlet as he leaps into the grave. ‘What is thy name?’ Macbeth is asked on the battlefield at Dunsinane, and he replies, ‘Thou’lt be afraid to hear it./…My name’s Macbeth.’ ‘Only we shall retain/The name and all th’addition to a king,’ says Lear, and then: ‘This is not Lear./…Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ Othello laments that ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone,’ speaking of himself in the third person, as a public man, and then, at the end of his play: ‘Speak of me as I am./…then must you speak/Of one that loved not wisely but too well.’ Speak of me as I am; pronounce my name. The rest, as Hamlet says, is silence.

At the close of each of these plays, the audience is left with the political men, the Octaviuses and Aufidiuses, the Horatios and Lodovicos and Malcolms, in a shrunken and impoverished world, a world from which a great name, a great power, has gone. ‘The death of Antony,’ says Octavius Caesar, ‘[i]s not a single doom; in that name lay/A moiety of the world’ (5.1.17-19). We are left, that is, in the world we have always lived in, a world in which, oddly, tragedy is a kind of luxury, an indulgence and a catharsis or purgation – something that happens for us so that it does not have to happen to us. That Shakespeare as playwright understood that function of tragedy is very clear from the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ play he provides for the amusement of the Theseus court in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This is what they accomplish for us, all these tragic figures with their titanic strengths and their titanic weaknesses – pride, stubbornness, vanity, and ambition on the one side, and on the other side radical insecurity, self-doubt, lack of self-knowledge, a fear of being merely human, of the bare, forked animal, of the boy of tears. It is through these figures, and these passages, that we discover that which above all Shakespearean tragedy has to offer us, for the radical question that was posed by tragedy is always the riddle of the Sphinx, the riddle that was posed to Oedipus, and that, by his answering it, sealed both his doom and his greatness: ‘What goes on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, on three in the evening?’ The answer to the riddle, and the name behind all these names, is the name of mankind, the name, as Coriolanus says, ‘most mortal’ to us. What Shakespeare accomplishes so brilliantly in Coriolanus is to make his bluntest, least-reflective, and most heedless tragic hero live the riddle – and then solve it.”

——————————-

From Tanner:

“The tragedy which Coriolanus experience and enacts is the discovered impossibility for a man ‘not to be other than one thing.’ He tries, more ferociously than any other of Shakespeare’s heroes. He can certainly dispense with the ‘cushion’ [MY NOTE:  ‘From the casque to th’ cushion’] – never wanted it, anyway. But he cannot defy or deny his mother. It is not, finally, in his ‘nature.’ Whatever that nature is. We hear and see quite a lot of his unnature, too, best summed up in Cominius’ description of him as he marches on Rome with the Volscians:

…he leads them like a thing

Made by some other deity than Nature,

That shapes men better…

(IV.vi.91-3)

To his mother, in the final scene, still trying to stave off her influence, he cries out:

     Tell me not

Wherein I seem unnatural. Desire not

T’ allay my rages and revenges with

Your colder reasons.

(V.iii.83-6)

It is perhaps his truest nature to be unnatural? In which case, when he capitulates and obeys ‘Great Nature,’ is he finally maturing into a new, recognized, and accepted humanity (as some have thought)? Or is he succumbing to an internal splitting which will destroy whatever integrity of identity he may have – helplessly regressing to the enfeebled status of ‘mother’s boy’? You can see it in either way; though I think it is better, somehow, to see it as both.

As he feels his resolve slipping in front of his family, he says:

     Like a dull actor now,

I have forgot my part and I am out,

Even to a full disgrace.

(V.iii.40-43)

When he was asked to stop being a soldier and at least pretend he was a politician, he discovered it just wasn’t in him to act a part. But this speech seems to imply that he is being discomfited out of his ‘part’ of the adamantine warrior. Or does he just mean that being confronted with his mother again gives him the equivalent of stage-fright? Is he losing his grip on what, exactly, he is as a man? The arguments and appeals with which his mother works on him need not be summarized here. He is effectively lost when she kneels to him – ‘What’s this?/Your knees to me? To your corrected son?’ (V.iii.55-6); it horrifies him as if it were some chaotic inversion in nature. She inevitably has her way with her ‘corrected son.’ But there is a barb in the words that recognize her triumph:

   O mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victor to Rome;

But, for your son – believe it, O, believe it! –

Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,

If not most mortal to him. But let it come.

(V.vi.25-6)

For Plutarch, the moment when Coriolanus gives in is all ‘nature.’ ‘And nature so wrought with him that the tears fell from his eyes and…[he] yielded to the affection of his blood.’ It is Shakespeare who makes Coriolanus deem it an ‘unnatural scene.’ At the very least, we can say that one ‘nature’ has been undermined by another, and while that is undoubtedly good for Rome (and perhaps humanity), Coriolanus is clearly right in sensing that it will prove disastrous for him. Much of the rest of his speech is in Plutarch – but not those last four words. ‘But let it come.’ This, as Brockbank remarked, is directly reminiscent of Hamlet’s ‘Let be.’ [MY NOTE:  I thought so as well.] It is as if he recognized that, by what had just happened, an inexorable process has been set in train, the outcome of which is at once unforeseeable and ineluctable. It amounts to a recognition and acceptance of the tragic workings of nature.

After this, it is easy for Aufidius to goad Coriolanus to a self-destructive fury. He calls him ‘traitor’ – as Rome did; denies him his ‘stol’n’ name; and, when Coriolanus invokes Mars, delivers the final taunt which he knows will drive him completely out of control: ‘Name not the god, thou boy of tears!’ (V.vi.101). This makes Coriolanus explode:

Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart

Too great for what contains it.

(V.vi.103-4)

and he calls down the knives:

Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,

Stain all your edges on me. ‘Boy’! False hound!

If you have writ your annals true, ‘tis there,

That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I

Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.

Alone I did it. ‘Boy’?

In a sense, Aufidius is absolutely correct (sometimes, nothing wounds like the truth) – Coriolanus did regress to being a ‘boy of tears’ in front of his mother. (Though, of course, there could be a less denigrating, more generous way of describing his transformation.) But if he goes down as ‘Boy,’ he wants once more to assert his old martial-eagle identity of the matchless warrior who could take a city ‘alone.’ And he wants to think of this identity and exploit asset down and preserved in the immutability of writing (not trusting to the vagaries of voice). ‘Annals’ are the distinctively Roman form of history, primarily associated with Tacitus (it is the only time Shakespeare used the word). Having employed the heroized Coriolanus, banished and then besought him, Rome will continue without him, finding other soldiers for other wars. That is why Coriolanus wants what he has been and done to be written ‘true’ and written ‘there.’ So ends the last great tragedy written for the English stage.”

—————————-

From Kermode:

“In the last two acts ‘voice’ yields precedence to ‘name,’ though one must remember that names are uttered by voices. With great deliberation Shakespeare states (or restates) the theme of names when Coriolanus meets Aufidius in his house at Antium:

Auf:  Whence com’st thou? Why wouldst thou? Thy name?

Why speak’st not? Speak man: what’s thy name?

Cor:             If, Tullus,

Not yet thou know’st me, and, seeing me, dost not

Think me for the man I am, necessity

Commands me name myself.

Auf:            What is thy name?

Cor:  A name unmusical to the Volscians’ ears,

And harsh in sound to thine.

Auf:            Say, what’s thy name?

Thou hast a grim appearance, and thy face

Bears a command in’t; though thy tackle’s torn,

Thou show’st a noble vessel. What’s thy name?

Cor:  Prepare thy brow to frown. Know’st thou me yet?

Auf:  I know thee not. Thy name?

Cor:  My name is Caius Martius, who hath done

To thee particularly, and all the Volsces,

Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may

My surname, Coriolanus.

(IV.ii.52-68)

His friends have forsaken him and suffered him ‘by th’ voice of slaves to be/Hoop’d out of Rome,’ with no possession other than that name (77-78). ‘Only that names remains’ (73). This extraordinary passage serves, with great economy, to remind us that the entire play is named after an ‘addition’ to the name Caius Martius, and that the loss of that name will cause his death. It is impossible to imagine more deliberate writing; the confrontation of the generals is a pivotal moment in the play, certainly, but so to draw out the moment of mutual recognition beyond the necessity of the action is to compel attention to the matter of naming. The ‘little language’ and the necessities of plot here coincide to wonderful effect.

The generals address each other in the second person singular, suitable for conversation with inferiors and children but also between lovers, and their language hereafter stresses the quasi-amorous nature of a relationship based on heroic fights, on envy. The life of such men is so simplified by their passion for fighting, for name and fame, that joy and pride in these qualities cannot be distinguished from emotions relative to love and sex. ‘Our general…makes a mistress of him’ (194-95). But Aufidius also wavers between love and treachery.

The Roman exile has brought his name to the very city where his claim to it will be most resented. Meanwhile, Rome and the tribunes celebrate a phony peace. Threatened by Coriolanus, they might like to ‘Unshout the noise that banish’d Martius!’ (V.ii.4). ‘Unshout’ is a monstrous, spectacular nonce-word, absolutely proper in this context, given that it has the support of all those shouts, roars, and hoots, as perhaps to no other. Meeting Cominius, the exile will not answer to the name ‘Coriolanus,’ indeed he ‘forbade all names;/He was a kind of nothing, titleless,/Till he had forg’d himself a name a’th’fire/Of burning Rome’ (V.i.12-15). His identity can be retrieved only by the fame of victory, but this time the city to be destroyed is Rome, not Corioli. He has mistaken their names as well as losing his own. He can hardly aspire to be called ‘Romanus.’

He resolves to face his mother without proper filial respect, to behave ‘As if a man were author of himself,/And knew no other kin’ (V.iii.36-37). But this desolation (to be titleless, nameless, kinless) is not sustainable. He gives in to ‘the most noble mother of the world’ (V.iii.49) and to the presence of his son, who, as he is reminded, is destined ‘to keep your name/Living to time’ (126-37). Not to yield, Volumnia tells him, would be to acquire a name ‘dogg’d with curses’ (144), a name ‘To th’ ensuing age abhorr’d’ (148). Moreover, he would lose the important epithet ‘noble’ (145), preferring his surname ‘Coriolanus’ to the prayers of his mother and wife (169-71).

The hero yields to his mother and Rome is saved, but he must now deal with Aufidius, whose lethal plot is consummated simply enough by a taunt concerning names – by his calling Coriolanus merely ‘Martius’ and saying the Roman had ‘whin’d and roar’d away’ (V.vi.97) a Volscian victory.

Cor:  Hear’st thou, Mars?

Auf:  Name not the god, thou boy of tears!

Martius got his original name from Mars. The insult to his name, and the insult of ‘boy’ – a man at the beck and call of his mother – together with the sneer about whining and roaring like a plebeian, are intolerable:

    ‘Boy,’ false hound!

If you have write your annals true, ‘tis there

That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles.

Alone I did it. ‘Boy!’

The terminally stressed ‘I’ at the end of line 114, and the ‘Alone I did it’ of the last line emphasize the self-regard of his claim to fame and to his surname. His enemies end the play with concessive talk of his ‘noble’ nature,’ for they, too, are in this respect like him, soldiers and destroyers; the word ‘noble’ tolls ironically through the last lines of this savage play, probably the most fiercely and ingeniously planned and expressed of all the tragedies.

The planning, like the ferocity of manner, has largely to do with words. They are so used as to ensure that in this bleak landscape no one is accorded true respect, not the generals, not the populace, not the tribunes, not the mother, not Menenius, and not Coriolanus himself, unless we mishear the undertones of such words as ‘noble,’ ‘fame,’ and ‘report.’ Like his son, who ‘mammocked’ the butterfly, he has been reared to follow a way of live that despises mere civility. He complains that the Romans once ‘godded’ him, but there is no middle way, and when not a god he is a beast, a fitting inhabitant of ‘th’ city of kites and crows’ (IV.v.42), until he takes a treacherous refuge with another treacherous hero, in a country which has good cause to hate him, no less for his name than for his fame.

Aufidius, in the last lines of the play, gives his murdered rival a military funeral and promises him ‘a noble memory’ (V.vi.147-53). But the word ‘noble,’ and the words ‘name’ and ‘fame,’ have acquired dark and changing colors from their disposition in the language of this lay; and we are left to consider the mental puzzles so deliberately made to involve us in daunting ambiguities.”

 ———————————–

And since not everyone thinks the world of the play, from Harold Bloom:

“The pathos of the formidable Coriolanus augments whenever we, or Shakespeare, consider the hero in conjunction with his ferocious mother, Volumnia, who must be the most unpleasant woman in all of Shakespeare, not excluding Goneril and Regan. Since Volumnia, like everyone else in the play, has only an outward self, we have few clues as to how an early Roman matron became Strindbergian (a nice comparison by Russell Fraser). In Shakespeare’s strangest play, Volumnia remains the most surprising character, not at all readily assimilable to your average devouring mother. She boasts of having sent Caius Martius off to battle when he was still very young (one remembers Othello as a child warrior) and she delights in blood, though it be her son’s:

     It more becomes a man

Than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba

When she did suckle Hector, look’d not lovelier

Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood

At Grecian sword contemning.

(I.iii.39-44)

This pathological grotesquerie cannot be far away from satire, like so much else in Coriolanus. With such a mother, Coriolanus, nasty as he can be, must be forgiven by the audience. I have never seen this tragedy played for laughs, like Titus Andronicus, but one has to wonder just what Shakespeare is at, as when the next hero-to-be, Coriolanus’s son is described at play:

Val:  How does your little son?

Vir:  I thank your ladyship, well, good madam.

Vol: He had rather see the swords and hear a drum, than look upon his schoolmaster.

Val:  O’my word, the father’s son! I’ll swear ‘tis a very pretty boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’Wednesday half an hour together. ‘has such a confirmed countenance. I saw him run after a gilded butterfly, and when he caught it, he let it go again, and after it again, and over and over he comes, and up again, catched it again, or whether his fall enraged him, or how ‘twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it. Oh, I warrant how he mammocked it!

Vol: One on’s father’s moods.

Val:  Indeed, la, ‘tis a noble child.

(I.iii.53-67)

Tearing butterflies to shreds with your teeth (‘mammocked it’) may well be a good training for getting into your father’s battle mood, but it will not recommend you to civil society. Possibly that is Shakespeare’s point; the Roman rabble, in a dozen years or so, will have to contend with another Caius Martius. In the meantime, as the current hero marches home, his mother and his friend greedily count up his wounds, to be shown to the people when he stands for the office of consul:

Men:  True? I’ll be sworn they are true. Where is he wounded? [To the Tribunes] God save your good worships! Martius is coming home: he has more cause to be proud. Where is he wounded?

Vol:  I’th’shoulder, and i’th’left arm: there will be large cicatrices to show the people, when he shall stand for his place. He received in the repulse of Tarquin seven hurts i’th’ body.

Men:  One i’th’neck, and two i’th’thigh – there’s nine that I know.

Vol:  He had, before this last expedition, twenty-five wounds upon him.

Men: Now it’s twenty-seven, every gash was an enemy’s grave.

A Shout and flourish

Hark, the trumpets!

(II.i.140-56)

Can this be performed, except as comedy? [MY NOTE:  Probably not, but I don’t think that applies to the play as a whole.] Shakespeare modulates quickly into the scene in which Coriolanus and the plebes banish one another, confrontations, just over the border from comedy. It is difficult to judge precisely how to take Volumnia, who owes a grim debt to Virgil’s frightening Juno. Shakespeare makes this lineage explicit when Volumnia declines a supper invitation:

Anger’s my meat. I sup on myself

And so shall starve with feeding. [To Virgilia] Come, let’s go.

Leave this faint pulling, and lament as I do,

In anger, Juno-like. Come, come, come!

(IV.ii.50-53)

Like mother, like son, he too sups upon himself and so shall stave with feeding. This is not funny only because, like Juno in the Aeneid, it is so scary. What is not all comic, but at last truly tragic, is the confrontation between Coriolanus and Volumnia when she exhorts him to turn back as he leads his Volscians against Rome:

Vol:

There’s no man in the world

More bound to’s mother, yet here he lets me prate

Like on i’th’stocks.

(V.iii.158-60)

Volumnia’s most unpleasant moment, this transcends nastiness because pragmatically it murders Coriolanus, as he informs his mother:

O mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victor to Rome;

But, for your son – believe it, O, believe it! –

Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,

If not most mortal to him. But let it come.

As tragedy, this seems to me more than grotesque, and perhaps its uncanniness places it upon the other side of tragedy. Janet Adelman, in a brilliant reading of this scene, concludes that ‘dependency here brings no rewards, no love, no sharing with the audience, it brings only the total collapse of the self, the awful triumph of Volumnia.’ Where there is no consolation, even if it is only the sharing of grief, can we still have the aesthetic experience of tragedy? In Coriolanus and in Timon of Athens, Shakespeare gives us the twilight of tragedy. Nothing is got for nothing, and the five great tragedies can be surmised to have cost Shakespeare a great deal. Reading King Lear or Macbeth attentively, or seeing them well performed (very rare), are shattering experiences, unless you are too cold or closed-off to care anymore. Writing King Lear and Macbeth is at the last a demonstration that you are neither chilled nor solipsistic. In the transition to Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, Shakespeare acknowledged that he had transcended a limit, and discovered he was as done with tragedy as with unmixed comedy.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD5xd4fMo1E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq5Fo44Zy5c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HY1qE8Hvo8

So…whose side are you on?  How highly do you rate Coriolanus?  Does it work for you, or is it too cold, too odd, too formal, too much an experiment that didn’t quite work?  Share your thoughts/feelings/questions with the group!

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning…final thoughts on Coriolanus, including views from Brecht, Bradley, and a look at the spectacular death scene from Olivier’s legendary 1959 production.

And a reminder…our next play…Cymbeline!

Coriolanus

Act Five, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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From Jan Kott:

“But Shakespeare’s world is crowded, and there are no empty spaces in it. There are just patricians, plebeians, and enemies of Rome. Coriolanus can only choose his place in the world that has been set on fire. He does not, and cannot, go away into nowhere, as romantic heroes do. Situations are historically determined, are above and independent of him. Coriolanus will go to the Volscians. History has proved the plebeians right: the enemy of the people has become the enemy of Rome. In the first three acts of Coriolanus a bare drama of class attitudes has been played out. One could call it also a drama of historical inevitability. There is no discrepancy in it between social situation and action, or psychology. Coriolanus could be nameless [MY NOTE:  Isn’t he really ‘nameless’ by Act Four anyway?], just as the First, Second, and Third Citizens are nameless. He is just an ambitious general, who hates the people and went over to the enemy camp when he was unable to achieve dictatorial power. It is only from the moment of Coriolanus’s treason that the world ceases to be clear-cut and arranged according to one principle. History is not a teacher of lay morality any more. The world’s contradictions become the next theme of the tragedy. This new theme is no less proper to Shakespeare than the former. Even the style has been changed: it is grotesque, pathetic, and ironical in turn. Coriolanus mocks himself and the world, as Hamlet has done when talking to Polonius. He even tells his dreams. ‘The time is out of joint,’ just as it has been in the kingdom of Denmark,

Third Serving Man:

Where dwell’st thou?

Coriolanus:

Under the canopy.

Third Serving Man:

Under the canopy?

Coriolanus:

Ay.

Third Serving Man:

Where’s that?

Coriolanus:

I’ th’ city of kites and crows.

Third Serving Man

I’ th’ city of kites and crows! – What an ass it is!

– Then thou dwell’st with daws too?

Coriolanus:

No, I serve not thy master.

(IV.5)

A traitor’s role does not fit Coriolanus. He is not determined by his situation, or by his social existence. His inner self does not agree to it. History has declared the plebeians right, but Shakespeare does not admit that history has been right, or at any rate ultimately right. History has proved stronger than Coriolanus; it has caught him and driven him into a blind alley; has made a double traitor of him. History has made fun of Coriolanus, but has not succeeded in breaking him. In Acts IV and V Coriolanus outgrows both Romans and Volscians, plebeians and patricians. In his defeat there is victory; at least victory in the sense that Conrad’s heroes experienced it.

‘His nature is too noble for the world,’ says Menenius about Coriolanus. While the people’s tribune, Brutus, throws the following words in Coriolanus’s face:

    You speak o’ th’ people

As if you were a god to punish, not

A man of their infirmity.

(III.i)

These two views are only superficially contradictory to each other. Coriolanus despises the world because the world is mean. He wants to destroy the world, including Rome, because the world and Rome do not deserve to exist:

I offered to awaken his regard

For ‘s private friends. His answer to me was,

He could not stay to pick them in a pile

Of noisome musty chaff. He said ‘twas folly,

For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt

And still to nose th’ offence.

(V.i)

Coriolanus opposes the world with his own absurd system of values. His defeat originated the moment he agreed, in spite of himself, to go to the Forum, show his scars and ask for votes. This was demanded of him not only by his mother, by Menenius Agrippa and the patricians, but also by the people and their tribunes. Shakespeare’s dramatic irony shows itself in the fact that both parties – even though in conflict and hating each other – demanded from Coriolanus a gesture of compromise. In the sudden reversal of values, brought about in the ending of the tragedy, Coriolanus is the only one who rejects compromise and gestures, or at least tries to reject them:

      Like a dull actor now,

I have forgot my part…

(V.3)

The world has again proved stronger than Coriolanus. Brutus was right: Coriolanus is only a man, full of weaknesses, like all other men. Coriolanus wants to destroy the world, because the world contradicts the laws of nature. But in the name of the same law of nature Coriolanus has been condemned by his mother, wife, and son. He has fallen into a trap set for him by the ruthless and all too real world. He falls victim to his own mythology, to a mad dialectic of the law of nature

….But out, affection!

All bond and privilege of nature, break!

Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.

…………………………………..

    I melt, and am not

Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows,

As if Olympus to a molehill should

In supplication nod; and my young boy

Hath an aspect of intercession which

Great Nature cries ‘Deny not.’

(V.3)

Coriolanus has realized that he has been cheated in the distribution of parts. He wanted to play the role of an avenging deity, while in the scenario of history it was only the role of a traitor. All that is left him is self-destruction. He will not spare Rome to confirm his own nobility, to get out of the part imposed on him. But in saving Rome he has to commit another treason. As a perjurer he will be killed by the Volscians. Coriolanus’s death is at the same time tragic and ironic. It is tragic in the world created by Coriolanus; tragic according to his mad and absolute system of values. It is ironic in the real world. Coriolanus’s bravery and nobility will be praised by the man who has killed him, the Volscian leader, Aufidius. He will pay the final tribute to Coriolanus, just as Augustus Caesar will to Antony, or Fortinbras to Hamlet. There is joy in Rome, and peace is celebrated. For the first time in this gram drama, full of clattering swords and howling crowds, there is music, and the sun rises. Coriolanus ends in the same was as Durrenmatt’s Visit. Anton Schill has been murdered, the people of Gullen enjoy their new affluence, and joyously celebrate the feast of justice.

The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries, and fifes,

Tabors and cymbals and the shouting Romans

Make the sun dance. Hark you!

(V.4)

Here likes the thorn in the flesh of this drama which for a long time has been the reason for its unpopularity. The image of the world is flawed and lacks cohesion. Contradictions have not been solved, and there is no common system of values for the polis and for the individual. ‘He loves your people; but tie him not to be their bedfellow,’ says Menenius Agrippa to Brutus referring to Coriolanus. This is not true. Coriolanus did not love the people. But this does not mean that Coriolanus should be condemned. In that sentence there is in a nutshell the bitter drama of Renaissance humanism; of any humanism, in fact.”

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Let’s move on to something fun – Coriolanus’s death.  The 1959 production at Stratford, directed by Peter Hall and starring Laurence Olivier had one of the most famous and talked about takes on this in recent memory.  From Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare and Modern Culture:

“There are numerous ways to set a production in relation to a political moment, and not all of them are consonant with Brecht’s idea of an epic theater. As one successive alternative, we might briefly consider the 1959 Stratford production of Coriolanus directed by Peter Hall and starring Laurence Oliver in the title role. (Hall was twenty-eight years old at the time, Olivier was over fifty. Olivier’s Caius Martius in the early scenes, boasting of his victories to his mother, then exhibiting modesty about them to the Senate, was seen as the performance of a privileged English schoolboy behaving according to a familiar code: ‘Nobody,’ wrote Laurence Kitchin, ‘lacking knowledge of English public school mores, could have hit exactly this note of sulky pride, a result of the man of action’s narcissism held back by the necessity to belittle success in the presence of social equals. So Olivier as Coriolanus was at first a reticent young British public-school type, though gifted with a powerful tone of command – and disdain. By the close, however, in an athletic feat (and a visual tableau) that made the production and the performance legendary, he leaped headfirst from a twelve-foot platform without the support of wires, his ankles caught at the last minute by two (doubtless terrified) actor soldiers, and dangled upside-down, the stage picture a deliberate echo of the dead body of Mussolini. After the Fascist dictator was captured and shot by Italian Communist partisans, Mussolini’s body was taken to Milan and hung, upside down from a meathook, as a lesson and a sign of ridicule.

This was in April 1945, almost fifteen years before the Hall

Mussolini is in the middle

production – but the memory of the image endured. Shakespeare’s text indicates that ‘the Conspirators draw, and kill Martius,’ after the people have cried ‘Tear him to pieces!…He killed my son! My daughter!…He killed my father!’ (5.6.121-23). But the Hall/Olivier image made Martius active rather than passive – and, at the same time, presented a visual quotation that associated him, for a brief but indelible moment, with Italian Fascism. (Mussolini, it might be noted, was killed – and then displayed – side by side with his mistress; Olivier/Martius, needless to say, is, as he declares proudly, and with no sign of his earlier reticence, ‘alone’ (5.6.117)). As Cynthia Marshall nicely observed, ‘when Olivier played Coriolanus, a performer sometimes accused of overacting took on the character of a man who would be nothing but ‘the thing I am.’”

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From Bradley:

“…His mother and friends urge him to deceive the people with false promises. But neither false promises nor apologies are needed, only a little humanity and some acknowledgment that the people are part of the state. He is capable of neither, and so the conflict is hopeless. But is so not because the people, or even the tribunes are what they are, but because he is what we call an impossible person.

The result is that all the force and nobility of Rome’s greatest man have to be thrown away and wasted. That is tragic, and it is doubly so because it is not only his faults that make him impossible. There is bound up with them a nobleness of nature in which he surpasses every one around him.

We see this if we consider, what is not always clear to the reader, his political position. It is not shared by any of the other patricians who appear in the drama. Critics have called him a Tory or an ultra-Tory. The tribune who calls him a ‘traitorous innovator’ is quite as near the mark. The people have been granted tribunes. The tribunate is a part of the constitution, and it is accepted, with whatever reluctance, by the other patricians. But Coriolanus would abolish it, and that not by law but by the sword. Nor would he be content with that. The right of the people to control the election of the consul is now new thing; it is an old traditional right; but it too might well be taken away. The only constitution tolerable in his eyes is one where the patricians are the state, and the people a mere instrument to feed it and fight for it. It is this conviction that makes it so dangerous to appoint him consul, and also makes it impossible for him to give way. Even if he could ask pardon for his abuse of the people, he could not honestly promise to acknowledge their political rights.

Now the nobleness of his nature is at work here. He is not tyrannical; the charge brought against him of aiming at tyranny is silly. He is an aristocrat. And Shakespeare has put decisively aside the statement of Plutarch that he was ‘churlish, uncivil, and altogether unfit for any man’s conversation.’ Shakespeare’s hero, though he feels his superiority to his fellow-patricians, always treats them as equals.’ He is never rude or over-bearing. He speaks to them with the simple directness or the bluff familiarity of a comrade. He does not resent their advice, criticism, or reproof. He shows no trace of envy or jealousy, or even of satisfaction at having surpassed them. The suggestion of the tribunes that he is willing to serve under Cominius because failure in war will be credited to Cominius, and success in war to himself, shows only the littleness of their own minds. The patricians are his fellows in a community of virtue – of a courage, fidelity, and honor, which cannot fail them because they are ‘true-bred,’ though the bright ideal of such virtue become perfect still urges them on. But the plebeians, in his eyes, are destitute of this virtue, and therefore have no place in this community. All they care for is food in peace, looting in war, flattery from their demagogues; and they will not even clean their teeth. To ask anything of them is to insult not merely himself but the virtues that he worships. To give them a real share in citizenship is treason to Rome; for Rome means these virtues. They are not Romans, they are the rats of Rome.

He is very unjust to them, and his ideal, though high, is also narrow. But he is magnificently true to it, and even when he repels us we feel this and glory in him. He is never more true to it than when he tries to be false; and this is the scene where his superiority and nobleness is most apparent. He, who said of his enemy, ‘I hate him worse than a promise-breaker,’ is urged to save himself and his friends by promises that he means to make. To his mother’s argument that he ought to no more mind deceiving the people than outwitting an enemy in war, he cannot give the obvious answer, for he does not really count the people his fellow-countrymen. But the proposal that he should descend to lying or flattering astounds him. He feels that if he does so he will never be himself again, that his mind will have taken on an inherent baseness and no more simulated one. And he is sure, as we are, that he simply cannot do what is required of him. When at least he consents to try, it is solely because his mother bids him and he cannot resist her chiding. Often he reminds us of a huge boy; and here he acts like a boy whose sense of honor is finer than his mother’s, but who is too simple and too noble to frame the thought.

Unfortunately he is altogether too simple and too ignorant of himself. Though he is the proudest man in Shakespeare he seems to be unaware of his pride, and is hurt when his mother mentions it.  It does not prevent him from being genuinely modest, for he never dreams that he has attained the ideals he worships; yet the sense of his own greatness is twisted round every strand of this worship. In almost all his words and deeds we are conscious of this worship. I take a single illustration. He cannot endure to be praised. Even his mother, who has a charter to extol her blood, grieves him when she praises him. As for others,

I had rather have one scratch my head i’ the sun

When the alarum were struck, than idly sit

To hear my nothings monster’d.

His answer to the roar of the army hailing him ‘Coriolanus’ is, ‘I will go wash.’ His wounds are ‘scratches with briars.’ In Plutarch he shows them to the people without demur; in Shakespeare he would rather lose the consulship. There is a greatness in all this that makes us exult. But who can assign the proportions of the elements that compose this impatience of praise: the feeling (which we are surprised to hear him express) that he, like hundreds more, has simply done what he could; the sense that it is nothing to what might be done, the want of human sympathy (for has not Shelly truly said that fame is love disguised?)., the pride which makes him feel that he needs no recognition, that after all he himself could do ten times as much, and that to praise his achievement implies a limit to his power. If anyone could solve this problem, Coriolanus certainly could not. To adapt a phrase in the play, h e has no more introspection in him than a tiger. So he thinks that his loathing of the people is all disgust at worthlessness, and his resentment in exile all a just indignation. So too he fancies that he can stand

As if a man were author himself

And knew no other kind,

While in fact public honor and home affections are the breath of his nostrils, and there is not a drop of stoic blood in his veins.

What follows on his exile depends on this self-ignorance. When he bids farewell to his mother and wife and friends he is still excited and exalted by conflict. He comforts them; he will take no companion; he will be loved when he is lacked, or at least he will be feared; while he remains alive, they shall always hear from him, and never aught but what is like him formerly. But the days go by, and no one, not even his mother, hears a word. When we see him next, he is entering Antium to offer his services against his country. If they are accepted, he knows what he will do: he will burn Rome.

As I have already remarked, Shakespeare does not exhibit to us the change of mind which issues in this frightful purpose, but from what we see and hear later we can tell how he imagined it; and the key lies in the idea of burning Rome. As time passes, and no suggestion of recall reaches Coriolanus, and he learns what it is to be a solitary homeless exile, his heart hardens, his pride swells to a mountainous bulk, and the wound in it becomes a fire. The fellow-patricians from whom he parted lovingly now appear to him ingrates and dastards, scarcely better than the loathsome mob. Somehow, he knows not how, even his mother and wife have deserted him. He has become nothing to Rome, and Rome shall hear nothing from him. Here in solitude he can find no relief in a storm of words; but gradually the blind intolerable chaos of resentment conceives and gives birth to a vision, not merely of battle and indiscriminate slaughter, but of the whole city one tower of flame. To see that with his bodily eyes would satisfy his soul, and the way to the sight is through the Volscians. If he is killed the moment they recognize him, he cares little – better a dead nothing than the living nothing Rome thinks him. But if he lives, she shall know what he is. He bears himself among the Volscians with something that resembles self-control; but what controls him is the vision that never leaves him and never changes, and his eye is red with its glare when he sits in his state before the doomed city.

This is Shakespeare’s idea, not Plutarch’s. In Plutarch there is not a syllable about the burning of Rome. Coriolanus (to simplify a complicated story) intends to humiliate his country by forcing on it disgraceful terms of peace. And this, apart from its moral quality, is a reasonable design. The Romans, rather than yield to fear, decline to treat unless peace is first restored, and therefore it will be necessary to assault the city. In the play we find a single vague allusion to some unnamed conditions which, Coriolanus knows, cannot now be accepted; but everywhere, among both Romans and Volscians, we hear of the burning of Rome, and in the city there is no hope of successful resistance. What Shakespeare wanted was a simpler and more appalling situation than we found in Plutarch, and a hero enslaved by a passion and driven blindly forward. How blindly, we may judge if we asks the questions: what will happen to the hero if he disappoints the expectation he has raised among the Volscians, when their leader is preparing to accuse him even if he fulfills it: and, if the hero executes his purpose, what will happen to his mother, wife, and child: and how can it be executed by a man whom we know in his home as the most human of men, a tender husband still the lover of his wife, and a son who regards his mother not merely with devoted affection but with something like religious awe. Very likely the audience in the theatre was not expected to ask these questions, but it was expected to see in the hero a man totally ignorant of himself, and stumbling to the destruction either of his life or of his soul.”

And with that…we are done with Coriolanus.  What did you think?  Did it meet expectations? Go beyond what you expected?  If you’ve never read it before, how did you like it?  If you have, how has your reading of the play changed?  Please…share your ideas and questions with the group!

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My next posts: Thursday evening/Friday morning, Sonnet #142; Sunday evening/Monday morning, my introduction to our next play, the remarkable Cymbeline.

Enjoy

Cymbeline

Act Three, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Three:  In Britain, Cymbeline has refused to pay the annual tribute to Rome, to which the Roman ambassador Lucius responds by declaring war. Meanwhile, Pisanio has received a letter from his master telling him to kill Imogen, but he tells her about it instead. Horrified, she begs him to go through with, but he persuades her to disguise herself as a man and travel to Rome in Lucius’s company. In the Welsh countryside, Belarius is out with his two sons (who are, in fact, actually Cymbeline’s sons, stole in infancy to avenge Belarius’s banishment!) when a hungry Imogen (now Fidele) appears. Back at court, her absence has (at last) been noticed, and Cloten decides to hunt her down.

It seems that Posthumus’s inability to trust his own feelings rather than his eyes is what proves to be Imogen’s undoing. It also introduces another strand of deceit in a play that braids them ever so tightly together. Inventing for her a sequence of “faults” (For even to vice,” he rages, women “are not constant”) 2.5.29-30, he sends one letter to her claiming his undying love while simultaneously arranging for Pisanio to murder her in cold blood. But unlike his master, Pisanio is unable to lie – he is in some ways the closest the play has to a hero – and so reveals the truth to Imogen. Struck to the core, she can only respond in pain. “Come, fellow, be thou honest,” she cries,

Do thy master’s bidding. When thou seest him,

A little witness my obedience. Look,

I draw the sword myself. Take it, and hit

The innocent mansion of my love, my heart.

(3.4.64-8)

Imogen’s urgent desire for death dos not prevail (Pisano simply can’t help her die), and tragedy is, at least for the moment, averted, but Imogen elects instead to undergo a metaphorical death instead – “forgetting” her womanly identity and exchanging her clothes, like so many Shakespearean heroines before her, for those of a young man, in order to flee to Wales.  The touching pseudonym she chooses, “Fidele,” of course means “the faithful one.”

Yet death, as we shall see, will prove difficult to charm away, and it won’t be long before it makes its presence more heavily felt.

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From Tanner: (Is anybody else enjoying his reading of the play as much as I am?)

“The third act sees the opening up of the action to the growing row between Rome and Britain and its extension to the new area of Wales, where we meet the long-banished Belarius and the King’s two lost sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. Imogen, following her ‘longing” (‘mine’s beyond beyond,’ III.iii.57), is deceived into setting out for Milford Haven (which is Wales) by a letter from Posthumus, where he has ordered Pisanio to murder her. It is at this point that Imogen enters the fog. The scenes in the Welsh mountains allow Shakespeare to open up pastoral issues concerning the differing claims and gifts of nature and nurture, and the various dispositions of natural man – thus, Cloten is a born savage made worse by civilization, while Guiderius and Arviragus are brought up as enfants sauvages yet reveal innately royal blood:

How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!

These boys know little they are sons to th’ King

…

I’th’ cave wherein they bow, their thoughts do hit

The roofs of palaces, and  Nature prompts them

In simple and low things to prince it much

Beyond the trick of others.

(III.iii.79-80, 83-6)

Belarius, understandably perhaps, given his bad experiences at court, extols the superior nobility of their simple primitive life in the wild nature of the mountains. But for the young boys it is ‘a cell of ignorance…a prison’:

Out of your proof you speak. We poor unfledged

Have never winged from view o’ th’ next, nor know not

What air’s from home…

   We have seen nothing,

We are beastly; subtle as the fox for prey,

Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat.

Our valor is to chase what flies.

(III.iii.27-9, 39-42)

Now, this very aerial play – heights and distances, good and bad air to breathe – is full of bird, both mean and proud: puttock, crows (lots of them), jay, raven – most nobly, the eagle; and, supremely, the phoenix. Belarius reveals something about his cowed (not coward) state when he sends the boys racing up to the heights of the hills, telling them to look down on him with a bird’s-eye view – ‘I’ll tread these flats’ (III.iii.11). He thinks that they will thereby learn a lesson of caution, seeing:

The sharded beetle in a safer hold

Than is the full-winged eagle.

(III.iii.20-21)

A defeated and disappointed man, Belarius has become a convinced hugger of the earth. But princes will need to be airborne, and warrior eagles rather than creeping beetles will command the concluding spaces of the play. And the Welsh mountains retreat is a far from safe refuge – as becomes apparent when the war threatens to engulf them all. Pastoral dreams cannot withstand the rigors of history; and the play refuses to sentimentalize life in the mountain wastes.

When Imogen learns, from the letter to Pisano, that Posthumus has convicted of her of adultery and ordered her death, she perceives a terrible danger which, potentially, threatens society itself.

     All good seeming,

By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought

Put on for villainy, not born where’t grows,

But worn a bait for ladies.

…

Goodly and gallant shall be false and perjured

From thy great fail.

(III.iv.55-8, 64-5)

The world is full of bad seeming which takes in good people – Shakespeare has no more constant theme. But what happens when people will not believe in ‘good seeming’ – then nothing and no one will be trusted, and good-bye all the virtues. It is, indeed, a ‘great fail.’ Somehow, the play will have to work to rehabilitate ‘good seeming.’ But not before there has been some more ‘seeming’ of, let’s say, an indeterminate kind, not least in the form of two disguisings (Pisanio provides both sets of clothes – visibly, the wardrobe man). The first is nothing new in Shakespeare. Imogen, who is now ‘dead to my husband’ (III.iv.132 – since Pisanio is supposed to have killed her), dresses up as a boy and sets out to seek service with the ‘noble’ Roman, Lucius, who is advancing towards Milford Haven. She is thus the last, and it has to be said least high-spirited, of Shakespeare’s epicene heroines. One little aspect of this disguising is worth noting. The wondrous whiteness of Imogen’s skin has been noted, and Pisanio regrets that she must exposes it to ‘the greedy touch/Of common-kissing Titan’ (III.iv.164-5), i.e. get sunburned (‘Titan’ is a name applied to the sun by both Virgil and Ovid). Belarius and the princes worship the sun and ‘heaven’ (the boys are referred to as ‘hot summer’s tanlings,’ IV.iv.29, and you won’t be surprised to learn that they are the only ‘tanlings’ – little tanned ones – in Shakespeare, or indeed anywhere else!), and when Imogen stumbles, as it were, into their territory, she has exchanged the court for life under the open sky – the larger point being that the play is overseen by Jupiter, ruler of the heavens.

I will come back to Imogen’s Welsh interlude. But the other disguising – of Cloten – is something else again. I must go back to a short scene in the second act when Cloten was urging his exceedingly unpleasant and unwelcome attentions upon Imogen. She tries to remain courteous in her rebuffs, but when Cloten dismisses Posthumus as ‘base slave,’ she flares out:

     His meanest garment

That ever hath but clipped his body is dearer

In any respect than all the hairs above thee,

Were they all made such men.

(II.iii.135-8)

All Cloten can do is stand there repeating incredulously ‘His meanest garment?’ – four times! Some critics have wondered at this – Frank Kermode, for example, found it excessive. But surely the impression we should get is that of a record that has got stuck. I register Cloten as a kind of automaton – an assemblage of all the conventional stage properties used to identify the villain. [MY NOTE:  Compare this with Wilson Knight’s take, in my previous post.] He makes all the most horrible and obnoxious villain-like noises – that is what the machine is geared up to do. But he is never intended to come across as a human being. Bizarrely enough, in one of my very appearances on the school stage, I played Guiderius, and when I walked on with Cloten’s head, saying:

This Cloten was a fool, an empty purse;

There was no money in’t. Not Hercules

Could have knocked out his brains, for he had none.

(IV.ii.113-15)

I was invariably met with gales of laughter. This was doubtless occasioned by my own inherent, undisguisable ridiculousness, but even then I dimly perceived that there was no known histrionic art which could render this entry anything but comic. Brockbank is surely right in suggesting that, with these lines, the ‘clotpole’ stage head would have been displayed as a hollow property. Very well, it might be said; but what is the point in confronting us with this noisy, hollow contrivance? This takes us to his disguising.

When Cloten hears that Imogen has fled from court, he is sure that she has gone to meet Posthumus, and he determines to follow. First, he bullies Pisanio into helping him, as now he has Posthumus’s servant. He tells Pisanio to bring him a set of Posthumus’s garments, and it so happens that Pisanio has ‘the same suit he wore when he took leave of my lady’ (III.v.125-6). While waiting for the clothes, Cloten runs over his planned revenge:

She said upon a time – the bitterness of it I now belch from my heart – that she held the very garment of Posthumus in more respect than my noble and natural person, together with the adornment of my qualities. With that suit upon my back will I ravish her; first kill him, and in her eyes. There she will see my valor, which will then be a torment to her contempt. He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his dead body, and when my lust hath dined – which, as I say, to vex her I will execute in the clothes that she so praised – to the court I’ll knock her back, foot her home again. She hath despised me rejoicingly, and I’ll be merry in my revenge.

(III.v.134-47)

The brutality machine is turned up to full volume (automata which seem to be alive may look comic, but they can also be very frightening). Pisanio brings the clothes, and Cloten is off.”

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And to continue with Garber:

“Belarius is a development of a classical pastoral type, or rather the combination of two familiar types, often linked in literature: the old man who once lived in the corrupt court and has now elected to dwell in the purity and innocence of the countryside, and the shepherd father who steals or adopts a changeling child not his own – a child who, inevitably in romance, and usually in pastoral, turns out to be of royal blood. The sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, exhibit their noble qualities despite the humble surroundings in which they live, although they are unaware of their own history, as Belarius observes, to himself and to the audience, the first time we meet them:

How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!

These boys know little they are sons to th’ King,

Nor Cymbeline dreams that they are alive.

They think they are mine, and though trained up thus meanly

I’th’ cave wherein they bow, their thoughts to hit

The roofs of palaces, and nature prompts them

In simple and low things to prince it much

Beyond the trick of others…

(3.3.79-86)

When Imogen encounters them in act 4, by that time disguised as the page boy ‘Fidele,’ she shares the surprise evinced by Orlando in As You Like It when he bursts into the Forest of Arden, dagger drawn, to find a highly civilized scene. Like Orlando, Imogen is astonished to find that forest dwellers can have manners:

They are kind creatures. Gods, what lies I have heard!

Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court.

(4.2.32-33)

There is an embedded irony here, since the ‘kind creatures’ of the cave do originate in the court (as Orlando’s singing, table-laying savages are actually Duke Senior’s ‘co-mates and brothers in exile’). Thus the world of romance (and ‘family romance’) is able, as usual, to have things both ways, so that noble savages turn out not to be real ‘savages,’ but in fact nobly born. Earlier, when she first met the boys, Imogen had made the same point made by Belarius. Here is Imogen:

Great men

That had a court no bigger than this cave,

…………………………

Could not outpeer these twain.

(3.7.79-84)

As is fairly common for pairs of sons in literary romance, the two boys are temperamental and emblematic opposites: Guiderius exemplifies the active ideal, and Arviragus the contemplative. The contrasting values of the active and the contemplative life had been an important subject of philosophical debate since the time of Aristotle. Commentators like Philo, Origen, Augustine, Gregory, and Thomas Aquinas all expressed views on the topic, which became a commonplace Renaissance theme. (A painting by Paolo Veronese is titled A Nobleman Between the Active and the Contemplative Life, and – like Hercules’ choice between Pleasure and Virtue, or the Neoplatonic debate between Sacred and Profane Love – this dyad was often represented in pictorial as well as literary form.) Guiderius, the elder son (and Cymbeline’s heir), is the ‘best woodman,’ the best hunter, and therefore the master of the feast. He will preside over the ritual of preparing the game, a ritual deliberately described in archaic, folkloric terms. It is Guiderius who taunts and then kills Cloten, the false, usurping heir arrayed against the true, disguised heir. His decapitation of Cloten, the removing of ‘Cloten’s clotpoll,’ is in romance terms the slaying of a monster of dragon, and at the same time that it resembles moments of resolution in the tragedies (Macduff holding up the head of Macbeth; the disguised Edgar defeating his rival Edmund). From this defined moment of achieved adulthood Guiderius will move forward, insisting upon leaving the safety of the (womblike) cave and joining, instead, the forces waging war.

The second son, Arviragus, is quieter, more inward and tenderhearted. He is especially fond of music, praising the ‘angel-like’ singing of the boy ‘Fidele.’ Arviragus performs what is perhaps the most touching domestic gesture of the entire play. Thinking that Imogen/Fidele is only asleep, he takes off his shoes so as not to make noise: ‘I thought he slept, and put/My clouted brogues from off my feet, whose rudeness/Answered my steps too loud’ (4.2.214-216). At this point neither the audience in the theater nor that on the stage knows that she is alive.

So vital and vibrant are these figures of the Welsh world that next to them the inhabitants of the court world never seem to come fully to life. Iachimo begins strongly, as an Italianate villain of the most satisfactorily corrupt and lustful kind, but he quickly disappears from the play, and when he resurfaces in the last act it is cravenly to confess his sins and beg forgiveness. As for Posthumus, he, too, is largely absent from the play’s radical actions. He is described in his absence in superlative terms, from the play’s first scene onward, in a familiar Shakespearean scenario: the comments of onlookers describe the hero before he comes on the stage, just as the Roman soldiers set the scene for Antony, or as Kent and Gloucester discuss King Lear. In this case it is gentlemen of the court who give us the general view of Posthumus. He

     is a creature such

As, to seek through the regions of the earth

For one his like there would be something failing

In him that should compare…

(I.i.19-22)

     lived in court –

Which rare it is to do – most praised, most loved;

A sample to the youngest…

(I.i.46-48)

‘Sample’ here is ‘example’: Posthumus was a model of good behavior. Notice again he ‘lived in court –/Which rare it is to do – most praised.’ In the first moments of the play the court of Cymbeline is already being exposed as a corrupting and fallen influence, and the way is being paved for the ameliorative and invigorating influence of the King’s soon-to-be-found sons.

But although the banished Posthumus is described in these elevated terms, not only by the anonymous gentlemen of the first scene but also by his wife, Imogen, and by his man Pisanio, the theater audience never really sees him in action until the deliberately schematic battle of the fifth act. He dreams, he sleeps, he ponders a riddle but ‘fails to decipher’ it. In fact, except for his martial heroism in the climactic battle, when (disguised as a British soldier) he joins forces with Belarius and the sons against the Roman army, Posthumus’s only visible action is to agree to the wager with Iachimo that tests Imogen’s chastity. It is a swaggering, boys-will-be-boys wager (based on a well-known episode in The Decameron of Boccaccio, and on a sixteenth century pamphlet called ‘Frederyke of Jennen’) that leads to separation and loss, and almost to tragedy. From an actor’s point of view, Posthumus is a fairly thankless role.

Imogen, on the other hand, is a brilliant part, and it justly became a favorite of actresses and audiences in succeeding centuries. Shakespeare’s first cross-dressed woman since viola, and the first and only woman disguised as a boy in one of his Jacobean plays, Imogen resembles both the inventive, disguised heroines of the comedies (Rosalind, Viola, Portia) and also the virtuous and muselike Marina, a quintessential figure of the romance genre. Like Marina, Imogen is described repeatedly in images of divinity. She is ‘[m]ore goddess-like than wife-like’ {3.2.8), she sings ‘angel-like,’ and Belarius says of her, when he encounters her disguised as the boy ‘Fidele,’

By Jupiter, an angel – or, if not,

An earthly paragon. Behold divineness

No elder than a boy.

3.6.42-44

Although Shakespeare never permits the comparison of a human being to a god or goddess to go unchallenged (male rulers, in particular, are cut down to size if they or their followers make this category error), the young women of the last romances come closest to this elusive state. Posthumus, though he ‘sits ‘mongst men like a descended god’ (1.6.170), is soon seen doubting his lady’s fidelity and sending off messages commanding that she be put to death. But Imogen, described as being like a goddess and an angel (with the usual Shakespearean qualification ‘or, if not,/An earthly paragon’), is, like Marina, closely associated with art and art making. She sings, and in her cookery she cuts roots into decorative characters (that is, both figures and letters of the alphabet). But where the typical romance heroine is often a fairly passive figure, who is adored (‘Admired Miranda!’) and who inspires wonder and poetry, Imogen is engagingly active, putting on a riding costume, racing on horseback to Milford Haven on the Welsh coast for her rendezvous with her Posthumus, then enlisting as a page in the Roman army once she believes she has lot both her husband her friends. Imogen, like Rosalind in As You Like It, was in Shakespeare’s time a boy actor playing a woman who disguises herself as a boy. She is ‘read’ by her Welsh rescuers (who will turn out to be her natural siblings) as somehow both male and female. In a way that is again reminiscent of Rosalind’s encounters with Orlando:

Guiderius:

Were you a woman, youth,

I should woo hard but be your groom in honesty,

Ay, bid for you as I’d buy.

Arviragus:

I’ll make’t my comfort

He is a man, I’ll love him as my brother.

………………………….

Imogen:

‘Mongst friends

If brothers. [Aside] Would it had been so that they

Had been my father’s sons…

………………………..

    Pardon me, gods,

I’d change my sex to be companion with them,

Since Leonatus’ false.

(3.6.66-74, 84-86)

Since Arviragus is also, in the plot, a young man, the play takes some pains to emphasize his difference from Imogen, a ‘woman’ (played by a boy) impersonating a boy. When later he speaks, in a lovely passage of verse, about the flowers he will strew on ‘Fidele’s’ grave, Guiderius interrupts him impatiently, ‘Prithee, have done,/And do not play in wench-like words with that/Which is so serious’ (4.2.230-232) The ‘wench-like words’ may have reminded a Shakespearean audience that such extended flower passages are often spoken by female characters in the tragedies and romances (Ophelia, Marina, Perdita), but the phrase also marks the difference between the ‘male’ Arviragus and the ‘female’ Imogen/Fidele, as does the immediately following mention of the changing voice of a young man (‘our voices/Have got the mannish crack’ (236-237); compare the teasing endured by the boy actor advised by Hamlet to pray that his voice, ‘like a piece of/uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring/ (Hamlet 2.2.410-411).

Another flower passage, the dirge Guiderius sings for Imogen/Fidele, ‘Rear no more the heat o’th’ sun,’ culminates in the haunting lines

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(4.2.263-264)

‘Golden lad’ and ‘chimney-sweeper’ were folk names for the dandelion, so this resonant passage, which seems to comment on early promise and loss and the hardships of the working world, is also an embedded nature fable with the implication of rebirth (the ‘dust’ of the dandelion is the seed head that scatters).  [MY NOTE:  I’ll have a lot more on this passage at the end of this post.]

Given the unfamiliarity of many modern readers and audiences with Cymbeline, it is important to emphasize the degree to which the play – and especially its heroine – was admired in past years. Imogen has been played by such stage luminaries as Sarah Siddons, Helen Faucit, Ellen Terry, and Peggy Ashcroft. Nineteenth-century novelists rhapsodized about her, citing her over and over as a female paragon: Sir Walter Scott in The Heart of Midlothian, William Makepeace Thackeray in Pendennis, Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset, George Eliot in Middlemarch. When Oscar Wilde came to write The Picture of Dorian Gray, he had Dorian go to the theater and fall in love with an actress, Sybil Vane, whose three signature parts are Juliet, Rosalind, and Imogen. The nineteenth century’s adoration of Imogen may be summed up by Algernon Swinburne’s comments in A Study of Shakespeare (1880):

‘The very crown and flower of all her father’s daughters, — I do not speak here of her human father, but her divine, — woman above all Shakespeare’s women is Imogen. AS in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the woman everlasting, so in Imogen we find half-glorified already the immortal godhead of womanhood. I would fain have some honey in my words at parting…and I am, therefore, something more than fain to close my book upon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all the tide of time: upon the name of Shakespeare’s Imogen.’

Swinburne’s final emphasis, ‘upon the name of Shakespeare’s Imogen,’ will help to explain why I do not [MY NOTE:  Nor do I] follow the Norton and Oxford editors in changing the character’s name back to the historical ‘Innogen,’ the name of the wife of Brut, or Brutus, the legendary king of Britain. Innogen is mentioned in Holinshed’s Chronicles, one of Shakespeare’s sources; in book 1 canto 10, of Spenser’s Faerie Queene; and in Drayton’s Polyolbion (1612), and the name makes a fascinating shadow appearance in the dramatis personae for Much Ado About Nothing in Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. (Rowe listed ‘Innogen, Wife to Leonato,’ but no such character appears in Much Ado, and the entry was dropped by the editor Lewis Theobald in 1733.) Some editors have speculated that the first Folio’s use of ‘Imogen’ throughout may be a misprint, but the name has by now taken on a life and character of its own. I think instead of attempt to rewrite literary history (by, for example, inserting footnotes in editions of Swinburne and Middlemarch to explain the discrepancy between a restored ‘Innogen’ and a Victorian ‘Imogen’), we should consider the plays of Shakespeare to be living artifacts with their own significant pasts. Since both the Folio and the Victorians write ‘Imogen,’ ‘Innogen’ seems to me a historicist affection. (Likewise with ‘Iachimo,’ which The Norton Shakespeare modernizes to ‘Giacomo’ In act 2 an angry Posthumus rails against ‘yellow Iachimo’ (2.5.14), which is likely to be alliterative, and I am not aware of any editorial inclination to respell or repronounce the name of the better-known Iago.”

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I was going to save this until we get to Act Four, but since Garber already briefly discussed it, I’d like to finish with this from A.D. Nuttall:

Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(Cymbeline, IV.ii.258-63)

I first heard these lines when I was about eight years old. They ravished me at once and have haunted me ever since. I knew nothing about Shakespeare. I suppose that if today someone were to ask me, ‘What is the finest lyric poem in the English language?’ I would point to this. And yet I do not understand the lines. Why ‘chimney-sweepers?’ It has been suggested that it is an old word for dandelions. I hope this explanation is wrong. If we think of the shock-headed golden flower the lines are at once more intelligible and more ordinary. I know that my childish mind conjured opposite images, glorious tall ‘lads and girls’ and a grimy, desperate child-worker, Blake’s ‘little black thing.’ The force of the lyric was in the vertiginous space between the golden people and the sooty figures – al alike ending in death. The violence of the difference threatens the sense of the stanza, but coherence is achieved by the latent but easy association of chimney-sweepers with dust. The association carries the mind from shining life to the dust of the grave at the end. If the sense ‘dandelion’ were proved right I would still want to fight a rearguard action, to say that calling the flower ‘chimney-sweeper,’ rather than the metrically identical ‘dandelion,’ briefly evokes counter-images of grimy darkness.

This is the dirge from Cymbeline, written soon after Pericles. It is spoken (not sung) by two brothers over someone believed to be dead but really alive, someone believed to be male but really female. This magnificent lamentation is therefore wasted, it might be thought, on a richly inappropriate object. It will by now be obvious that the old energies of earlier Shakespearean comedy are being reactivated. This in yet another form is the topos of defeated satire; that is, where we expect the incongruity of high imaginings and low, purblind human error to result in a satirical guying of those high imaginings, instead the mistakings on the part of the human agent seems to throw the exalted idea into purer relief. As the music of marriage soared above circumstance at the end of All’s Well That Ends Well, so here the elegy for all the young people who must die soars above the conditions of its singing.”

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Your thoughts so far?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBRGNyg6I0Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VxKenuQQCY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PZCmT1aw0g

My next post:  More on Act Three, Sunday evening/Monday morning.

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Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

The Winter’s Tale

Act Three, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Three:  Leontes formally accuses Hermione of adultery and plotting to kill him, but she remains firm in her innocence and declares that Apollo will be her judge.  But when the oracle’s words – which describe Hermione as utterly and totally blameless – are read out, Leontes declares them to be false and orders the trial to continue. But chaos ensues when news arrives of Mamillius’ sudden death: Hermione collapses and is carried away, while Leontes begins to regret his horrible mistake. Paulina arrives and in no uncertain terms denounces Leontes before announcing that the Queen has died. Antigonus, meanwhile, has abandoned the baby (who he named Perdita) in Bohemia, where she is found by the Shepherd and his son, who take her home.

————-

As I mentioned in my first post on Act Two, when Hermione says to Leontes, “My life stands in the level of your dreams,” it seems clear that Leontes, and his fantasies/dreams, seemingly have absolute power.  But his “dreams,” unlike those of Othello, encounter resistance. Despite doubting the paternity of his daughter, who is born while Hermione is imprisoned, the energy of the girl’s arrival (she is, says Emilia, “lusty, and like to live” (2.2.29)) seems to offer promise.  And when good news arrives from the Delphic oracle, which Leontes consulted in the hope of silencing his critics, it seems as if everything will be happily resolved.  “Hermione is chaste,” it proclaims,

Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found.

(3.2.132-5)

In language of startling clarity (here Shakespeare copies it almost word for word from his source), the oracle dismisses the King’s crabbed fantasies in an instant. Redemption seemingly beckons.  But Leontes, not hearing what he wanted to hear, cries out that it is “mere falsehood” and will not accept a verdict which differs from his own, and by this time he has already ordered that the newborn child be taken out of the kingdom and left exposed to the elements “where chance may nurse or end it” (2.3.183). Upon that “chance” – and with the oracle’s challenge of dire consequences if “that which is lost be not found” – the rest of The Winter’s Tale hangs.

The next shock is sudden:  it is announced that Mamillius has died.  Hermione collapsed at the news, then it is declared that she, too, is dead. Paulina, her steadfast defender, is terrifyingly outspoken in her grief: “I say she’s dead,” she screams at Leontes, “I’ll swear it.”

     If you can bring

Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye,

Heat outwardly or breath within, I’ll serve you

As I would do the dogs. But O thou tyrant,

Do not repent these things, for they are heavier

Than all my woes can stir. Therefore betake thee

To nothing but despair. A thousand knees,

Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,

Upon a barren mountain, and still winter

In storm perpetual, could not move the gods

To look that way thou wert.

(3.2.203-13)

The barriers to any kind of resolution seem as impenetrable as any futile penance Leontes could trouble himself with. The play seems trapped in tragedy.

But at the same time, The Winter’s Tale, like Mamillius’ story (or even Pandosto) end sadly. Antigonus has abandoned the child in Bohemia – she is called Perdita, “lost” – where in the middle of a furious storm (of course), she is discovered by a kindly shepherd. Like the fisherman in Pericles who haul our hero from the ocean and cheerfully promise top care for him, the Old Shepherd proves an unstoppably kindly force. “What have we here!” he exclaims:

Mercy on’s, a bairn! A very pretty bairn! A boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one. Sure some scape. Though I am not bookish, yet I can read ‘waiting-gentlewoman’ in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work. They were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here. I’ll take it up for pity…

(3.3.68-74)

Assuming the child has been abandoned because it is illegitimate (conceived, he chuckles, on the stairs, perhaps, or in a trunk, behind a door), at a stroke he converts what has been Leontes’ public nightmare into something entirely unexceptional. It doesn’t matter if the baby is a bastard – what matters is that it needs to be looked after. Hearing of the terrible storm at sea, the Shepherd tells his son, “Thou metst with things dying, I with things new-born (3.3.111).

——————————————————–

From Tanner:

“The short opening scene of Act III is literally a breath of fresh air, reminding us how unpleasantly heated, fetid and claustrophobic the court has become. Out on the open road, Cleomenes and Dion are marveling in retrospect at the atmosphere on the temple-island of the oracle – ‘The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet,/Fertile the isle’ (III.il1-2) – bringing home to us the indelicacy, foulness, and sterility (children dead and thrown out) which have prevailed in the preceding scenes. Dion says:

     I shall report,

For most it caught me, the celestial habits

(Methinks I so should term them) and the reverence

Of the grave wearers. O, the sacrifice,

How ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly

It was i’ th’ off’ring!

(III.i.3-8 – my bold)

The words in bold remind us of all the positive, civilized qualities and dignities which Leontes has abandoned or destroyed in his own court, where, truly, all the ‘ceremonies of innocence’ have been drowned. Oh for a cup of this island air – one might fairly yearn. But we are instantly plunged back into the inverted, deranged world that Leontes is creating around him. We are in what Leontes calls ‘a court of justice.’ It is, of course, quite monstrously the reverse.

We have, more than once in Shakespeare, seen ruthless characters appropriate the language and procedures of the law, and subvert, pervert, them to serve, and seemingly justify, their own willful and dastardly purposes – Othello and Angelo come to mind, but the phenomenon is widespread. It is, of course, a standard practice of all tyrants; and in trying to clear himself of such a charge, Leontes simply draws attention to its truth and applicability.

     Let us be cleared

Of being tyrannous, since we so openly

Proceed in justice, which shall have due course,

Even to the guilt or the purgation.

(III.ii.4-7)

Oh no it won’t; or rather, in the end it will, but not through the agency of Leontes.

He continues with his unevidenced accusations, and Hermione’s three long speeches in her own defense are models of dignity, decorum and poise. As she so accurately says:

     if I shall be condemned

Upon surmises, all proofs sleeping else

But what your jealousies awake, I tell you

‘Tis rigor, and not law.

(III.ii.109-12)

Shakespeare often speaks of the ‘rigor’ of the law; Leontes has substituted it for the law. It seems a too moderate word for his behavior. Hermione appeals to a higher court:

     if powers divine

Behold our human actions – as they do –

I doubt not then, but Innocence shall make

False accusation blush, and Tyranny

Tremble at Patience.

(III.ii.27-31)

The personifications bring in something of the atmosphere of a morality play – appropriately enough, since Leontes has become the embodiment of Tyranny, while Hermione will prove herself the quintessence of Patience – that indispensable virtue in these late plays. Hermione rests her case, as it were:

     Your honors all,

I do refer me to the oracle:

Apollo be my judge!

(III.ii.112-14)

Leontes gives the order – ‘Break up the seals and read.’ And now Apollo delivers some of his thunder:

Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found.

(III.ii.130-33)

Leontes tries to dismiss it – a last hopeless madness:

There is no truth i’ the’ oracle,

The sessions shall proceed; this is mere falsehood.

(III.ii.137-8)

But then things start to happen quickly.

He is told his son has died, and Leontes realizes that the gods are angry:

     Apollo, pardon

My great profanes ‘gainst thine oracle.

I’ll reconcile me to Polixenes,

New woo my queen, recall the good Camillo.

(III.ii.150-53)

– and everything will be fine again. But rectification, reparation, and restoration are not so easily achieved or arrived at – not by a very long way. Paulina then enters with the news that the Queen is dead, and it is now that Paulina comes into her own and takes on a dominant role. She is the deliberately tactless and abrasive voice of accusation and reproach and even ‘vengeance.’ In modern parlance, she gives Leontes a tongue-lashing; she says all the things that the dead Hermione would be all to justified in saying – indeed, Paulina effectively stands in for the Queen…She calls Leontes a lot of unkingly names in a most uncourtly manner. Think of all the tyrannous, damnable things you have done, she tells him, ‘and then run mad, indeed, stark mad’ (III.ii.181). Leontes cowers before her, concedes the justice of what she says, and agrees to follow the course of penitence and repentance she lays down. Effectively, she becomes the custodian of his conscience.  [MY NOTE:  MAJOR PLOT SPOILER FROM HERE TO THE END OF THE NEXT PARAGRAPH.  Personally, I think knowing it will add to your reading of the play, but if you don’t want to know…skip ahead to my next note telling you it’s ok to continue.]

One of her speeches is prophetic – and not, I feel, without a degree of calculation. She insists that Hermione is dead:

I say she’s dead; I’ll swear it. If word nor oath

Prevail not, go and see; if you can bring

Tincture or luster in her lip, her eye

Heat outwardly or breath within, I’ll serve you

As I would do the dogs. But, O thou tyrant

Do not repent these things, for they are heavier

Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee

To nothing but despair.

(III.ii.201-8 – my bold)

Now, not that anybody else knows it, including the audience, but this is simply not true. Hermione is not dead. This is artifice (or lying with a positive purpose); and I sense that Paulina already has her long-term plot in mind, since this speech anticipates the final scene in which ‘heat,’ ‘breath,’ and ‘stir’ will prove to be the crucial, climatic words, and phenomena. But of course, everyone from the King down believes Paulina; and as far as the audience is concerned the action has come to a tragic conclusion. But it’s only the end of Act III. What will Shakespeare do now?

[MY NOTE:  IT’S SAFE TO START READING AGAIN]

There is, in fact, one more scene to Act III, and it serves as a bridge between the court of Sicilia and rural Bohemia. Set on the famously non-existent sea-coast of Bohemia, it shows Lord Antigonus depositing the dead Queen’s rejected child in a deserted plot, as ordered by the King. Antigonus is convinced that Hermione is dead because he has had a particularly vivid dream. He says to the babe that he is sure he has seen her dead mother’s spirit:

     Thy mother

Appeared to me last night; for ne’er was dream

So like awaking.

(III.iii.16-18)

There is a greater ‘awaking’-dream yet to come. In this one, Hermione has seemingly returned to instruct Antigonus:

     In pure white robes,

Like very sanctity, she did approach

My cabin where I lay; thrice bowed before me,

And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes

Became two spouts; the fury spent, anon

Did this break from her: ‘Good Antigonus,

Since fate, against thy better disposition,

Hath made thy person for the thrower-out

Of my poor babe, according to thy oath,

Places remote enough are in Bohemia,

There weep, and leave it crying; and for the babe

Is counted lost forever, Perdita

I prithee call’t…’

(III.iii.21-33)

In this apparitional form, Hermione appears as something of a goddess (and something of a fury), rather like Diana ordering Pericles in a dream; she has taken on an unearthly, holy authority. Something, some power, seems to be intervening to direct things. (In Pandosto the baby is abandoned in a boat in the sea and arrives at the island of Sicilia by chance.)

Antigonus of course obeys; and here is laying Perdita down in a remote part of Bohemia. Stormy weather threatens; the day darkens ominously – ‘A savage clamor’ (III.iii.55). He exits ‘pursued by a bear.’ Incontestably a comical stage direction looked at flat. But, in context, it is not funny. The bear, itself probably either starving or being hunted and frightened into attack (Callisto), like the storm at sea which wrecks the ship while the bear is tearing Antigonus to pieces, is part of the ‘savage’ side of nature which seems to have been activated and released in relation or response – in some obscure way – to the savage and unnatural acts of Leontes.

Then a shepherd enters – and we are in a different world. It is not just that he speaks in prose, which we have not heard since the gentlemanly chatting of the opening scene – though of course that does have the effect of slackening the tension. The voice is also so down-to-earth, of-the-earth; in touch, as one feels, with what Whitman called the ‘primal sanities of nature.’ The Shepherd talks easily of ‘country matters’ – hunting and herding, stealing and fighting, browsing and wenching (he is notably relaxed about sex). Here, one feels, is a clear-sighted, sober-minded realist. After hearing Leontes raving round his Sicilian court, it makes a change. Finding little Perdita, the Shepherd instinctively takes her up – ‘for pity.’ Similarly, his son Clown (in the original sense of rustic), goes off to bury the remains of Antigonus – ‘That’s a good deed’ says his father approvingly (III.iii.132). Between them, they take care of ‘things new born’ and things dying.’ This is not to idealize or sentimentalize our country cousins. Simply, they are people with sound instincts still in place – perhaps, indeed, partly because they have never had to negotiate the complex power relations, the hierarchical rituals and ceremonial deferences, the bribes and threats, of court. Shepherd and clown remain nameless – they are generic, even telluric, and long may the earth continue to produce them.”

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And to continue with Garber:

“Leontes’ enslavement to his own prison of the mind has brought down disease and sterility upon the landscape, sleeplessness and solipsism upon himself. The winter movement of the play, the weight almost of tragedy, threatens to move beyond the reversible limits of romance.

It is particularly striking, therefore, that at this point in the play there occurs one of what I have been calling ‘window scenes’ – scenes that open up, for a brief moment, a new world of insight. The scene I have in mind is the first scene of act 3, and the event is the return of the King’s emissaries from the oracle of Apollo. Here is what these emissaries say when they return to Sicilia:

Cleomenes:

The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet;

Fertile the isle, the temple much surpassing

The common praise it bears.

……………………….

Dion:

O, the sacrifice –

How ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly

It was i’th’ off’ring!

Cleomenes:

     But of all, the burst

And the ear-def’ning voice o’th’ oracle,

Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surprised my sense

That I was nothing.

(III.i.1-11)

In this short description we are offered a complete reversal of the conditions of Sicilia and its king: a delicate, sweet climate instead of infection; a fertile island, rather than a sterile land, a ceremonious and solemn sacrifice, symbolically made, rather than the unnatural and perverse sacrifice of the newborn child. Most of all, we hear Cleomenes’ wonder at the voice of the oracle, which was so overwhelming that, in his own phrase, ‘I was nothing.’ Leontes had reduced all the world outside himself to nothing – the sky, Bohemia, his wife. Cleomenes does the opposite, feeling himself rendered insignificant by the voice of the god. Fittingly, Apollo is the god not only of poetry and music – both of which are key elements in the latter part of the play – but also of healing. And the messengers, racing along the road with their sealed prophecy, another romance riddle, close out the scene with a pious wish: ‘Go Fresh horses!/And gracious be the issue.’

Leontes: Break up the seals and read.

Officer:

Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found.

(III.ii.130-33)

But Leontes, of course, denied the oracle, denies, in effect, holy writ: ‘There is no truth at all i’th’ oracle./…This is mere falsehood.’ And on the utterance of this blasphemy, word arrives immediately of young Mamillius’s death; Queen Hermione faints and is reported dead herself; and the stricken King gives himself over to a pattern of fruitless ritual, a daily visitation of their single grave. He is apparently condemned to perpetual winter, as Paulina points out starkly: ten thousand years of naked fasting on a barren hillside in winter will not move the gods his way. The tragic winter movement of the play is closed, and the situation seems without hope.

It is at this point that Shakespeare deftly and imaginatively transfers our concerns from Sicilia to Bohemia, allowing the audience to follow along in what is apparently the one unfinished aspect of the tale, the fate of the child Perdita, the King’s daughter. Perdita, as we have seen, is in the custody of Antigonus, the courtier husband of Paulina, and Antigonus is in his own mind bent upon a noble action. Just as his wife’s name designedly invokes the figure of Saint Paul, so Antigonus’ name suggests Antigone, the elder daughter of Oedipus, who, to bury her brother, defied King Creon’s decree, was condemned to death, and killed herself before the repentant Creon could reverse his decree. Antigonus, too, will die. Is there any justice, any literary or human justification for his death? If Mamillius’ death can be regarded as a reminder of the existence of evil and death in the world, an innocent death confirming the accountability of loss, why is a second death dramatically necessary? Isn’t one symbolic sacrifice to mortality enough?

Perhaps it is. But Antigonus is also culpable, in a way that Mamillius is not. In the play, he is most directly compared to Camillo, another of the King’s courtiers. But whereas Camillo refuses to carry out Leontes’ mad command, and flees, Antigonus consents to do so, and is killed. In the action and dramatic logic of The Winter’s Tale, Camillo then ‘replaces’ Antigonus as Paulina’s husband at the close. The character is redeemed, so to speak, by the change. (The two parts may originally have been doubled in performance, and often are cast in this way in modern productions.) This is a good example of the difference between romance characters and tragic ones, where tragedy is irreversible: Antigonus’s death, ‘tragic’ in local terms, is subsumed, dramatically, into a bittersweet ending in which Paulina does recover a husband, and is included in the cluster of celebratory ‘reunions’ at the close.

In addition to his blind obedience to Leontes, Antigonus betrays another flaw: he seems to believe that Hermione may indeed have committed adultery, since as he lays down the child he says, ‘this being indeed the issue/Of King Polixenes.’ For this lack of faith, too, we may perhaps imagine that he is punished. And yet the manner of his punishment is of particular interest, for it is thematically linked – and linked in spectacular fashion – to the basic cyclical structure of the play.

‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ announces what is, arguably, the most famous of all Shakespearean stage directions. This is testament, surely, to the Jacobean love of spectacle, evidenced by the Bear Garden on the banks of the Thames, and the popular pastime of watching bearbaiting (a favorite with Henry VIUI and Elizabeth I). But the bear of The Winter’s Tale is also linked to the landscape and practice of romance. Antigonus had been warned that the coast of Bohemia harbored ‘creatures/Of prey.’ And, more to the point, the bear is an animal if special interest – as contrasted, say, with the exotic elephant or zebra – because bears are associated with a particular natural pattern: they hibernate, passing the winter in a state of torpor, and then reawaken in the spring. Thus they offer a pattern of death and rebirth, even of resurrection: several ancient Greek cults worshiped bear gods, believing that the bear died and was reborn.

The embedded tragedy of Antigonus’ death is mitigated somewhat, in the context of The Winter’s Tale, by the way it is described. For this is another Shakespearean ‘unscene,’ unseen by the audience, reported in this case by an interested – and agitated – spectator:

Clown:

I would you did but see how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore. But that’s not to the point. O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! Sometimes to see’em, and not to see ‘em; now the ship boring the moon with her mainmast, and anon swallowed with yeast and froth, and you’d thrust a cork into a hogshead. And then, for the land-service, to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone, and how he cried to me for help, and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman! But to make an end of the ship – to see how the sea flap-dragoned it! But first, how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them, and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than the sea or weather.

Old Shepherd:

Name of mercy, when was this, boy?

Clown:

Now, now. I have not winked since I saw these sights. The men are not yet cold under water, nor the bear half dined on the gentleman. He’s at it now.

(3.3.83-98)

The lovely elegance of ‘dined’ here contributes, oddly enough, to our sense of distancing in this remarkable report. It is a report of not one but two tragedies, and yet the atmosphere of Bohemia and the simple and compassionate tone of the Old Shepherd and the Clown conspire to make it seem not immediate tragedy, but far-off romance, shipwreck, and loss.

The bear’s victim cried out for help, and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman. What difference did his name and rank make to the bear? There is no such thing as rank in the Bohemia to which the audience is now introduced, despite the political existence of a king and prince – both of whom will shortly appear in humble disguise. There is no visible court, no corrupted world of ‘civilization’ all that we see of Bohemia is seacoast and shore and nature, the radicals of existence. As the seasons are cyclical, so life and death are cyclical; as Mamillius is a flower who droops and declines, so the infant Perdita is laid down by Antigonus with the words ‘Blossom, speed thee well.’ And as the Clown is compassionate witness to an emblem of loss, so his father, the Old Shepherd, becomes beneficiary to something found, something he compares to the riches that surround it, and identifies as fairy gold: Perdita, the lost child of romance. At this still point in the play, between losing and finding, between tragedy and epiphany, the Old Shepherd speaks lines that offer, in their balance and their tone of calm acceptance, the underlying fable of the play:

Now bless thyself. Thou metst with things dying, I with things new-born.

(3.3.104-105)

This is the fable that underlies the winter’s tale we are never allowed to hear, the tale that begins “There was a man –/…Dwelt by a churchyard.’ As Old Shepherd and Clown together prepare to bury the dead, and nurture the living, and all the while turn tragedy into romance by feeling its story, the turn toward spring and rebirth is almost at hand.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMPigZbSwMM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm7beWEkpa8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQwpJypQ7eg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2hfgWmBmWY

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning — More on Act Three

Enjoy

The Winter’s Tale

Act Three, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

 ———————-

First off, some highlights from Mark Van Doren, without the most often used quotes from the play:

“’The Winter’s Tale’ tells of grievous divisions between friend and friend (Leontes and Polixenes), king and queen (Leontes and Hermione), father and daughter (Leontes and Perdita); and, after sixteen years, between father and son (Polixenes and Florizel). The ‘wide gap of time’ which goes unchronicled between the third and fourth acts might seem to give us two plays instead of one, but there is only one. It is conceived in contrast, and is dedicated to the task of stating with all the force of which poetry is capable the opposition between age and youth, cruelty and goodness, jealousy and faith. The abstract symbols it employs are winter and spring: winter with its blasts of January and storm perpetual, spring with its virgin branches and its daffodils that come before the swallow dares. But its concrete symbols are of course human beings; Leontes and Perdita divide this great poem between them – the one an obsessed husband and ruthless father, the other a faultless daughter, ignorant of her parentage, who grows up in a cottage, not a court, and who restores to the final plays the maiden image which Imogen had for the moment obscured. ‘A sad tale’s best for winter,’ Mamillius tells Hermione, and a series of happy endings does not make this poem gay. Leontes’ half is never lost in Perdita’s, however much its memory is softened. The play is one but its halves are two, and each of them underlines the other.

Leontes infects the whole of the first three acts with the angry sore of his obsession. There is no more jealous man in literature. Once being jealous Othello could go mad, but the jealousy of Leontes is madness from the start, and it has a curious way of feeing on itself, so that the delusion which inspires it is worse than irresistible; it is nothing less than the condition of its victim’s life, and the expression of it gives him in some perverse way a horrible pleasure. The intensity of his speech is out of all proportion to its cause; there is no cause, nor has Shakespeare bothered to prove that this is so, his interest being confined to the deep, straight line he wants to draw, the instance of evil he needs to begin with. We are not shown that Hermione is innocent of adultery with Leontes’ boyfriend friend Polixenes, the King of Bohemia who has been visiting him so many months. We assume that she is, even though the Sicilian court is a brilliantly and frankly sensual place, the heavy richness of whose life and the animal leisureliness of whose pleasures we gather at once from the courtesy of the first scene and from the luxury of the second. Both are baroque, and it cannot be said of the two kings that they who once were ‘pretty landings’ and ‘twinn’d lambs’ have grown into ascetics, or that Hermione, queen to Leontes, longs delicately for compliment.

…

We assume that Hermione is innocent; and go on to understand why the delusion of Leontes should be so luxuriant, why the poetry in which he embalms it should seem to be that of a man whose appetite for expressing himself is fierce and unnatural, as if it fed riotously on words and heated itself to a fever with wild phrases. His speech is not the clear, cool, perfect speech of Perdita sixteen years later. It is mad with its own riches, and fiery-red with a rash of exaggeration. His first aside, after he has commended Hermione to urge upon their guest a still longer stay and she has done so by placing her hand in that of Polixenes, opens his whole mind to us…(here is the “Too hot, too hot!” speech)

…..

It is a mind in which images of his betrayal work like maggots, swarming and increasing with every moment of his thought. The good Camillo’s denial that Hermione can be false brings on a fury of evidence, all of it perversely imagined; and there is more of it now than there was a few minutes past…(Here is the “Is whispering nothing?” speech.)

….

The mind of Leontes always rushes. A single epithet or conceit is rarely sufficient to express his nerve-wracked bitter madness; he must find others at once and pile them on, or he must extend the one he has by repetition and hyperbole:

Inch-thick, knee-deep, oe’r head and ears a fork’d one!

(I.ii.186)

     Was this taken

By any understanding pate but thine?

For thy conceit is soaking, — will draw in

More than the common blocks. Not noted, is ‘t,

But of the finer natures? By some severals

Of head-piece extraordinary? Lower messes

Perchance are to this business purblind?

(I.ii.222-8)

He must develop every idea until it is grotesque, and his brain exhausts itself in a search for terms and analogies; though it soon is itself again, and rages on. He is sometimes so difficult that we cannot follow the twists of his thinking:

Affection! thy intention stabs the centre.

Thou dost make possible things not so held,

Communicat’st with dreams; — how can this be? –

With what’s unreal thou coactive art,

And fellow’st nothing. Then ‘t is very credent

Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost

And that beyond commission.

(I.ii.138-44)

This is the obscurest passage in Shakespeare, and it is no wonder that Polixenes puts in: ‘What means Sicilia?’ Leontes means in general that the impossible has become all too possible, but the particulars of his meaning are his own. His utterances are half to himself, fitting the creases of his thought rather than the form of any truth; and they exactly, insanely, fit:  (Here would be the “Sir Smile, his neighbour” speech and the “I have drunk and seen the spider” speech)…plus

Nor night nor day no rest. It is but weakness

To bear the matter thus; mere weakness. If

The cause were not in being, — part of the cause,

She is the adulteress; for the harlot king

Is quite beyond mine arm, out of the blank

And level of my brain, plot-proof; but she

I can hook to me: say that she were gone,

Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest

Might come to me again.

(II.iii.1-9)

He is never at a loss for something to say; ideas or pieces of ideas pour into his brain pell-mell, so that he cannot find enough room there to make all of them comfortable. The epithets he lays upon the good Paulina – ‘gross hag,’ ‘a callat of boundless tongue,’ ‘a mankind witch, ‘a most intellgencing bawd’ – seems to torture him as well as slander her; and the fallacies his mind commits are such as only frenzy can account for, as when he answers Hermione’s appeal to his memory of her honorable behavior with this outrageous logic:

     I ne’er heard yet

That any of these bolder vices wanted

Less impudence to gainsay what they did

Than to perform it first.

(III.ii.55-8)

Leontes is an artist of jealousy, an expert in self-hurt, and he so utterly dominates the first half of the play as to keep other speakers, brilliant though they me, secondary to himself. Polixenes, for instance, who shares with his old friend the fashion of intricate speech, is buried under that same friend’s abuse. Paulina, whose tirades are no more wonderful than the eight words she addresses to Leontes when Hermione swoons:

     Look down

And see what Death is doing.

(III.ii.149-50)

shines only in her antagonism to a king’s injustice. Even Hermione, who can say

I love thee not a jar o’ the clock behind

What lady she her lord,

(I.ii.43-4)

who remembers her father and wishes he were alive to behold his daughter’s trial, and who knows how to make up with tenderness and story-telling for the irritation her pregnancy has made her feel in the presence of the boy Mamillius (II.i), is lost in the less admirable figure of Leontes. Leontes is less admirable than anybody, but the disease of his suspicion is one whose progress we watch spellbound. And from the first it declares itself as a disturbance from which the play cannot be expected wholly or at any rate blithely to recover. It is an absolute crime, and he will never be able to expiate it without the help of grace; sixteen years of ‘saint-like sorrow’ will not teach him how to forget a fit of jealousy so extreme, so baseless, as to have needed the oracle of Delphi for its correction. He has done damage that cannot adequately be undone; first of course to Hermione, and though her to Mamillius, but after that to the infant daughter he has refused to recognize as his and sent with the good Antigonus – for the play has its trio of ineffectual saints – to death on the seacoast of Bohemia. That the exposed infant does not die, but is found in a transition scene by two ineffable shepherds along with the fairy gold Antigonus has left for the finder, gives us Perdita, and Perdita will grow up in a shepherd’s cottage to be Leontes’ grace. From now on it is Perdita’s play, and her delicious presence in it will restore ‘spring to the earth.’ And yet even in her presence the past of Leontes will not be forgotten, nor will the world of the play be wholly what it was before he drank the spider. The formula of reconciliation is honored, but the second half of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ still has its gravity, its veins of dark iron across an otherwise untroubled pattern.”

———————————-

From G. Wilson Knight:

“Hermione is brought to trial. Leontes opens the proceedings with a disclaimer:

     Let us be clear’d

Of being tyrannous, since we so openly

Proceed in justice…

(III.ii.4)

His fear, as before, marks a recognition; the tyranny in his soul he would film over by a show of judicial procedure. Hermione’s defence is characterized by lucidity and reason; her ‘integrity’ (III.ii.27) is in every syllable; she is expostulating as with a nervous invalid. She wields a martyr-like strength:

    But thus: if powers divine

Behold our human actions, as they do,

I doubt not then but innocence shall make

False accusation blush, and tyranny

Tremble at patience.

(III.ii.29)

She aims to increase his already obvious discomfort; that is, to appeal to his ‘conscience’ (III.ii.47). She is being condemned by his ‘dreams’ (III.ii.82); we should say ‘fantasies.’ Her language grows more and more coldly convincing:

     Sir, spare your threats:

The bug which you would fright me with I seek

To me can life be no commodity;

The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,

I do give lost; for I do feel it gone,

But know not how it went. My second joy,

And first-fruits of my body, from his presence,

I am barr’d, like one infectious. My third comfort,

Starr’d most unluckily, is from my breast,

The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth,

Hail’d out to murder…

(III.ii.92)

Notice the vivid physical perception and nature-feeling in ‘first-fruits’ and ‘milk’; we shall find such phrases elsewhere. The calm yet condemnatory scorn of Hermione’s manner shows a close equivalence to that of Queen Katharine on trial in Henry VIII (II.iv). Both are daughters of a foreign king suffering in a strange home. Hermione is ‘a great king’s daughter’ (III.ii.40), daughter of ‘the emperor of Russia’ (III.ii.120-4): compare Henry VIII, II.iv.13, 46; III.i.81-2, 142-50. both appeal, with a similarly climactic effect, to the highest known authority, Queen Katharine to the Pope and Hermione to the Oracle:

    …but for mine honour

Which I would free, if I shall be condemn’d

Upon surmises, all proof sleeping else

But what your jealousies awake, I tell you

‘Tis rigour and not law. Your honours all,

I do refer me to the oracle:

Apollo be my judge!

(III.ii.111)

The request is granted by one of the lords: in the ritual of both trials the king is half felt as a subject before the majesty of law.

So Cleomenes and Dion swear on a ‘sword of justice’ (III.ii.125) that the ‘holy seal’ (III.ii.130) is intact; and the package is opened. Hermione and Polixenes are cleared and Leontes revealed as ‘a jealous tyrant,’ who must live ‘without an heir if that which is lost be not found’ (III.ii.133-7). Truth is thus vindicated by the voice of supreme judgment accusing Leontes of lawless tyranny; but the devil in him is not easily exorcised. At first he will not submit; asserts blasphemously that ‘there is no truth at all in the oracle’ (III.ii.141); probably seizes the paper and tears it to shreds, insisting that the trial continue, thereby revealing his utter subjection of justice to the egotistic will. But now, following sharply on his impious disregard, comes news of Mamillius’ death. No dramatic incident in Shakespeare falls with so shattering an impact; no reversal is more poignant than when, after a moment’s dazedness, Leontes’ whole soul-direction changes:

Apollo’s angry; and the heavens themselves

Do strike at my injustice.

(III.ii.147)

Great nature, the giver of children, can as easily recall them; that nature is, here, the transcendent Apollo, who both guides and judges. Leontes’ crime, be it noted, is one of ‘injustice.’ Hermione faints and is taken away by Paulina.

Leontes next speaks two revealing phrases: ‘I have,’ he mutters, ‘too much believed by my jealousies’ (III.ii.152, 159). He has allowed himself to be temporarily possessed, dominated, by something in himself which, given power, has ‘transported’ him, that is, changed his nature as by magic (cp. ‘translated’ at A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i.125). By this inward usurpation the essence of tyranny and injustice has lodged in him, only to be exorcised by the violent impact of his crime’s actual result: Mamillius’ illness was first brought on by Hermione’s disgrace (II.iii.13-17). Now Leontes, having awakened from his delirious dream, speaks with a new simplicity:

     Apollo, pardon

My great profanes ‘gainst thine oracle!

I’ll reconcile me to Polixenes,

New woo my queen, recall the good Camillo…

(III.ii.154)

But his punishment is not over. Paulina returns, and with a long speech of considered vehemence says exactly what wants saying, because now only can its import register:

What studies torments, tyrant, hast for me?

What wheels? racks? Fires? What flaying? Or what

    boiling

In leads, or oils? what oil or newer torture

Must I receive, whose every word deserves

To taste of thy worst?

(III.ii.176)

Suggestion of tyranny here reaches its climax; though Paulina refers to ‘thy tyranny together working with thy jealousies’ (III.ii.180), they are two aspects of one reality, one complex, from which Leontes’ actions have flowed. Paulina, comparing him to a devil (III.ii.193), lists his crimes, with bitter irony suggesting (what is a half-truth) that they are none of them his fault; and concluding with news of Hermione’s death and a demand for vengeance from Heaven. Throughout, she is playing on his conscience, more – she is his conscience.

Hermione, she says, is dead, and the man who could resurrect her must needs be worshipped as a god (III.ii.208):

     But, O thou tyrant!

Do not repent these things, for they are heavier

Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee

To nothing but despair. A thousand knees

Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting

Upon a barren mountain, and still winter

In storm perpetual, could not move the gods

To look that way thou wert.

(III.ii.208)

The association of winter and penitence, though not itself new (see Love’s Labour’s Lost, V.ii.798-815), assumes here a new precision. Paulina’s voice, so hated before, now matches Leontes’ own thoughts and is accordingly desired:

     Go on, go on;

Thou can’st not speak too much: I have deserv’d

All tongues to talk their bitterest.

(III.ii.219)

Rebuked for her forwardness, she answers:

     I am sorry for’t:

All faults I make, when I shall come to know them

I do repent.

(III.ii.219)

She is, indeed, repentance incarnate: that is her dramatic office. Now she recognizes that Leontes is ‘touch’d to the noble heart’ (III.ii.222), nobility, in the chivalric tradition, involving Christian virtues; but, in apologizing for reminding him of what he ‘should forget,’ she only further defines her office; and the more she emphasizes and lists the sorrows she will not refer to, the loss of Leontes’ queen and children, as well as her own lord, the more she drives home on him his grief (III.ii.223-33). He, however, prefers ‘truth’ to ‘pity’; would live into, perhaps through, the purgation of remorse; and ends speaking of the ‘chapel’ where his queen and son are to be buried, and where he will attend in sorrow so long as ‘nature’ gives him strength (III.ii.233-43). His last words hold a subdued dignity; his speech is calm and lucid; he is now, as never before, kingly.

No full-length Shakespearian tragedy reaches the intensity of these three acts; they move with a whirling, sickening, speed. Leontes is more complex than Othello as a study of jealousy and more realistically convincing than Macbeth as a study of evil possession. In him are blended the Renaissance, man-born, evil projected through Iago and the medieval supernaturalism of the Weird Sisters. He and his story also include both the personal, family, interest of Othello and the communal, tyrannic, theme of Macbeth, whilst defining their relation; that is, the relation of emotional and sexual unhealthy to tyranny; hence the repeated emphasis here on ‘tyrant’ and the opposing concepts of justice and constitutional law. Macbeth’s crime is an act of lustful possessiveness to be contrasted (as I have shown at length in The Imperial Theme and The Shakespearean Tempest) with the creative kingship of Banquo in association with child-images and nature; while conjugal jealousy is a concentrated exaggeration of domestic ownership and domination, sexually impelled. Clearly each dramatic theme is enriched by mingling with the other, and indeed we find Leontes marking an advance in Shakespeare’s human delineation: the poetic and philosophic overtones of Hamlet, Lear and Timon are compressed into a study as sharply defined as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and as objectively diagnosed as Ford, Malvolio and Parolles. Hence the violent detonation.

The play’s morality interest, though less-surface-patent than that of Pericles, will be clear. But a warning is necessary. Though Shakespeare writes, broadly speaking, from a Christian standpoint, and though Christianized phraseology recurs, yet the poet is rather to be supposed as using Christian concepts than as dominated by them. They are implemental to his purpose; but so too are ‘great Apollo’ and ‘great nature,’ sometimes themselves approaching  Biblical feeling (with Apollo as Jehovah), yet diverging also, especially later, into a pantheism of such majesty that orthodox apologists may well be tempted to call it Christian too; but it is scarcely orthodox. The Winter’s Tale remains a creation of the Renaissance, that is, of the questing imagination, firmly planted, no doubt, in medieval tradition, but not directed by it. There is a distinction here of importance.

And now, as an echo to our court-tragedy, our action enters, as it were, the elemental background of all tragedy; the wild and rugged Bohemian coast, with threatening storm. We are behind the scenes, where the organizing powers fabricate our human plot. The skies are ominous, as though Heaven were angry at the work in hand (III.iii.3-5), for Antigonus, exactly obeying Leontes’ command, has brought the child to this ‘remote and desert place,’ where ‘chance my nurse or end it’ (II.iii.175, 182). It is to be thrown on the mercies of nature:

     Come on, poor babe:

Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens

To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say,

Casting their savageness aside have done

Like offices of pity.

(II.iii.184)

The ruling powers have, however, themselves taken charge, directing Antigonus to this fierce and rugged spot. ‘Their sacred wills be done’ (III.iii.7), he says. He recounts how Hermione has appeared to him in a dream, ‘in pure white robes, like very sanctity’ – again a forecast of Queen Katharine – so that he regarded her as a ‘spirit’ come from the ‘dead’; and tells how she directed him to leave the child in Bohemia. The dream was so convincing that it seemed more real than ‘slumber’; and he therefore deduces that Hermione ‘hath suffer’d death’ and that, the child being in truth Polixenes,’ it is Apollo’s will it be left in his kingdom (III.iii.15-450. he is wrong about the child, but right about Hermione; or again wrong as to both. His ghostly account, with its suggestion of present deity, is the more powerful for the inhuman grandeur of its setting. So, either ‘for life of death,’ he leaves the baby upon the ‘earth’ of this inhospitable place; buries it, as a seed, to live or die, praying, ‘Blossom, speed thee well’; entrusting it to forces beyond man’s control, while hoping that the treasure he leaves may help to ‘breed’ it (III.iii.4-8). The child is enduring, as it were, a second birth, with the attendant risks, the synchronization of storm and birth recalling Pericles. The spot is, as we have been told, famous for its beast of prey. The storm starts and Antigonus is chased off by a bear.

The incident is as crude as the sudden entry of pirates in Pericles. But as so often there, Shakespeare is molding events from his own past imagery. His recurrent association of tempest with rough beasts, especially bears (as at King Lear, III.iv.9-11), is here actualized: the storm starts, the bear appears, and we have a description of a shipwreck. We must take the bear seriously, as suggesting man’s insecurity in face of untamed nature; indeed, mortality in general.

The scene is a hinge not only for the story but also for the life-views it expresses. We are plunged first into the abysmal smithies below or behind creation, in touch with ghostly presences and superhuman powers; but next, as one dream dissolves into another, we pass form horror to simple, rustic comedy. We met a precisely similar transition in Pericles, where the fishermen fulfilled an office closely resembling that of the Shepherd and Clown here: in both homely rusticity is synchronized and contrasted with storm and shipwreck. There is, however, no satire here in the rustics’ talk, except for the Shepherd’s opening remark on the behavior of men between sixteen and three and twenty, always ‘getting wenches with child, wrong the ancientry, stealing, fighting’ (III.iii.48-62), which recalls Thersites, whilst continuing our present obsession with birth and age; but there is no more of it. More important are the two lost sheep which he expects to find by the sea ‘browsing of ivy’ (III.iii.68): it is somehow very reassuring to find the simple fellow at his homely job after our recent terrors with their appalling sense of human insecurity. Both the Shepherd and his son are thoroughly at home in this weird place; its awe-inspiring quality fades, as memory of nightmare before the heavy step and traffic of dawn. Bears are no terror to them, they know their ways: ‘they are never curst but when they are hungry’ (III.iii.135). The scene wakes into semi-humourous prose, sturdy commonsense, and simple kindliness.

There is the usual mismanagement of words typical of Shakespeare’s clowns, but the humor soon takes a new turn in the son’s exquisite description of the wreck and Antigonus’ death, subtly veiling the horror and removing its sting. Tragedy is confronted by comedy working in close alliance with birth:

Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things new born.

(III.iii.115)

The baby is found with a casket of gold The Shepherd calls it a ‘changeling’ and attributes his luck to the ‘fairies’ (III.iii.121-2). So the craggy setting is lit by the glow of ‘fairy gold’ (III.iii.127). We have entered a new, and safer, world.”

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And finally, from Mahood’s Shakespeare’s Wordplay:

“We can quote the Geneva Bible with no sense of incongruity. The presiding deity of the play may be  Apollo, but the Christian scheme of redemption is a leading element, though not by any means the only element, in its pattern of ideas. Grace, with gracious a keyword of the play, is frequently used in its theological sense of ‘the divine influence which operates in men to regenerate and sanctify’ (N.E.D. II.6b). As Everyman, Humanity, Leontes is able to recall a primeval innocence when he was ‘Boy eternal’:

We were as twyn’d Lambs, that did frisk i’ th’ Sun,

And bleat the one at th’other: what we chang’d,

Was Innocence for Innocence: we knew not

The Doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d

That any did: Had we pursu’d that life,

And our weake Spirits ne’re been higher rear’d

With stronger blood, we should haue answer’d Heauen

Boldly, not guilty; the Imposition clear’d,

Hereditarie ours.

In the dialogue which follows, the word grace is used three times by Hermione, the implication being that she acts the role of regenerative grace to Leontes now he has exchanged innocence for Experience. But immediately there follows Leontes’ rejection of this grace in his outburst against Hermione. ‘You’le be found, Be you beneath the sky’ is his threat to Hermione and Polixenes; the words are strong dramatic irony, since it is Leontes himself who is sinning in the sight of Heaven, the single Eye of Apollo made actual to us by the sight images of Leontes’ talk with Camillo in the first act – ‘your eye-glasse is thicker then a Cuckolds Horne’ (I.ii.268); ‘a Vision so apparent’ (270); ‘to haue nor Eyes’ (275); ‘and all Eyes Blind with the Pin and Web, but theirs’ (290); ‘Canst with thine eyes at once see good and euill’ (303); ‘Seruants true about me, that bare eyes’ (309); ‘who may’st see Palinely, as Heauen sees Earth, and Earth sees Heauen’ (314).  The small but vitally important scene between Cleomenes and Dion, as they return from Delphos at the beginning of Act III, stresses this awesome aspect of the Destroyer Apollo, whose oracle is ‘kin to Ioues Thunder’; and their hope that the issue of their visit will be gracious is not immediately fulfilled. Apollo keeps jealous guard over the fortunes of the gracious Hermione, and her belief that ‘Powres Diuine Behold our humane Actions’ is vindicated when, his oracle defied, Apollo at once smites Leontes with the death of Mamillius: ‘Apollo’s angry, and the Heauens themselues Doe strike at my Injustice.’

Leontes’ change of heart, from a proud defiance of the God to guilt, despair, and finally a sober repentance, is marked by two instances of wordplay. At the beginning of the trial scene he announces that justice shall have ‘due course, Euen to the Guilt, or the Purgation.’ In the legal sense, human justice will proceed to find Hermione guilty or give her the chance ‘of clearing [her] self from the accusation or suspicion of crime and guilt’; in the theological sense, Apollo’s justice will establish Leontes’ guilt and will also purify him from it by the repentance vowed at the end of the scene:

     Once a day, Ile visit

The Chappell where they lye, and tears shed there

Shall be my recreation.

Recreation and re-creation: the pun is a promise that Leontes is to become ‘man new made’ at the end of the play, for Apollo offers him grace in the sense of time for amendment (N.E.D, II 7) and also hope for the eventual grace of pardon (N.E.D. II 8). The King takes to himself the words of Hermione:

I must be patient, till the Heauens looke

With an aspect more fauorable,

(II.i.105-6)

and her withdrawal symbolizes Everyman’s patient hope in the return of grace. In the major tragedies of Shakespeare, patience had been a stoical virtue, the capacity to endure. Here it is a Christian virtue, the ability to possess one’s soul in patience, which is rewarded when…[MY NOTE:  I’ll skip this to avoid giving away the plot].

Meanwhile Perdita has ‘grown in grace’; as with Tuesday’s child, the word has a theological as well as a physical meaning. At the sheep-shearing feast, Leontes’ grace of repentance and Hermione’s grace of patient forgiveness are kept in mind by Perdita’s graceful presentation of flowers to the disguised Polixenes and Camillo:

     Reuerend Sirs,

For you, there’s a Rosemary, and Rue, these keepe

Seeming, and savour all the Winter long:

Grace, and Remembrance be to you both,

And welcome to our Shearing.

(IV.iii.73-7)

The theological language of the play’s first part is revived and intensified when the action returns to Sicily.”

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Our next reading:  Act Four, The Winter’s Tale

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.