Phoenix Falmouth

Roman Caius Marcius is a successful soldier but a terrible politician. After defeating the Volscians at Corioles and earning a new surname, Coriolanus, the tragic hero refuses to pander to the plebeians and wins their wrath rather than their electoral support of his appointment as consul. As the audience sees how the tribunes Brutus and Sicinius manipulate public opinion to their own ends, Coriolanus does not appear as entirely unsympathetic. ( )

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

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

A few quotes from the Signet Classic edition:

- A. C. Bradley (1912):

“perhaps no reader ever called it his favorite play.”

- D. A. Traversi (1938):

“Coriolanus has rarely satisfied the critics. Most of them have found it frigid and have even suggested that Shakespeare’s interest flagged in the writing of it”

- Wyndam Lewis (1955):

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

- Joyce Van Dyke (1988):

“Coriolanus does not have much of a sense of play.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2021-11-19]