Coriolanus

by William Shakespeare

  Coriolanus may be capricious, volatile, and naive, but Aufidius is an even less stable character: witness the violence of his mood swings. Trevor White seized upon these with some relish. Aufidius doesn't realize that in his unequivocal welcome of his archenemy he has, as one of his servants says, cut himself in the middle and "is but one half of what he was yesterday." In the very next scene that we see Aufidius he is already disdainfully calling Coriolanus "the Roman" and regretting his precipitous action, jealous of the man's charismatic effect on his own soldiery. "And you are darkened in this action, sir," warns the lieutenant, "Even by your own."

  The two men cannot truly be friends, as their characters demand that they are the sole champion, the leader, the best, the cup holder, and there can only be one of those. Rome ain't big enough for the both of them: "the fall of either Makes the survivor heir of all." By Act 5 Coriolanus is already pushing his new ally around: "My partner in this action, You must report to th'Volscian lords, how plainly I have borne this business." Aufidius complains that though he took his enemy into his house and made him his equal, "joint-servant with me," "till at the last I seemed his follower, not partner." It is hard not to detect under his bitterness a profound sense of slighted affection. His determination that Coriolanus shall die "And I'll renew me in his fall" is jealously neurotic, but with its overtones of ritual sacrifice is also disturbingly revealing.

  Which brings us to the question of his relationship with his mother: what did you discover about that?

  Farr: That she was as much a warrior as him--if anything, possibly more so. She has to be fearsome, she has to be a woman who amazes. Rome was full of these women who were as politically powerful as the men and it's interesting what happened to that tradition, because we don't seem to have that in the same way. She's as fearsome a warrior as him, she is at times more male than him, and yet crucially the two moments where she intervenes are moments of traditional female supplication: moments where she pleads for him to be gentle, the opposite of what she has brought him up to be, and those moments destroy him. The first time they cause his banishment, the second time they cause his death. That seems to me to be very clearly and archetypally painted by Shakespeare. We know instinctively as an audience watching that his Achilles heel is her, the one person who can persuade him to act against his nature, because she is the person who has created his nature. I think we all instinctively understand and believe that psychologically: that the mother of this kind of man is the one person who can reach him and press buttons in him and make him operate and behave in ways that he would not do for anyone else. It's a brilliant piece of psychological insight on Shakespeare's part and probably the most powerful mother-son relationship in all his work. It's certainly the strangest. Out of nowhere he produces it and writes it and it's as modern and as powerful as anything. It's remarkable.

  7. "Possibly the most potent pause in Shakespeare": Janet Suzman's Volumnia waits on Coriolanus (William Houston) to answer her appeal for mercy in Greg Doran's 2007 production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Doran: Volumnia has bred a monster. He refers to himself as a "dragon," and indeed so does Menenius. Her tragedy is that by finally getting him to give up his attack on Rome, she kills him. Her triumphal reentry into Rome, as its great patroness--"life of Rome!"--is silent. But Janet Suzman and I chose to make her silence eloquent (like the silence of her son in the previous scene, when he takes her by the hand--possibly the most potent pause in Shakespeare). Her entry is heralded by the senator bidding Rome "Unshout the noise that banished Martius." We decided that a speech is expected from her, that she would silence the crowd in order to address them. After all Volumnia is never short of a word or two. She has just delivered a fifty-line appeal to her son, surely one of the longest speeches in Shakespeare. But when it comes to it, she cannot say anything. Even she cannot spin this personal disaster into a civic triumph. She has just killed her son and she knows it. Janet held the moment, trying to articulate some potent propaganda which will glorify her son. It was electrifying. Finally she turned and walked away.

  How did you stage the crucial encounter in which Volumnia succeeds in stopping and silencing her son?

  Farr: Normally when you direct a scene you read through it three or four times and then rehearse it two or three times in detail before running the whole play. I had an instinct with that long scene between them, with Virgilia also in attendance, that we needed to do it in a very different way. Greg Hicks, Alison Fiske, and Hannah Young were the three actors in this case. It so happened that we had a long rehearsal process and that all of them were available quite a lot, because they didn't have massive roles in the other play that we were paired with. I think we must have rehearsed that scene twelve to fourteen times and we just played different things with it every time. We got it into our skin. It was an instinctive feeling I had, that this was a scene of such psychological complexity that you couldn't just "do" it, you had to "be" with it, for hours. We could have done it for a lot longer; there was an enormous amount there. The only scene that is comparable in my experience of the Shakespeare I've done is the scene between Lear and Gloucester on the heath, when you feel that you could spend six months just with this scene. The quality of "lived-in-ness" in that scene was vital to find. In our play I think we played him at the age of about forty. You obviously can't in the rehearsal process discuss all their shared forty-year history--it would take you forty years. You can only really discuss elements, so the way in which we created that lived-in, real sense of shared history, shared possession of each other's souls, was through endless rehearsal repetition and just physically finding it within the actors' bodies and minds. There was no other way to reach the level where this scene takes place. It's very obvious when you read the play that no one else, even Virgilia, can understand what is really happening between these two people, but we can feel it and we can intuit it when we watch it.

  And how did you view the relationships between Coriolanus and his wife and son?

  Farr: The Japanese setting gave us strict social and political rules which were very helpful in the approach to the containment of the women and defining the way in which Virgilia dresses and the whole way in which she should be seen or not be seen in relationship to her husband. The boy is so much like I imagined the "boy" of Caius Martius to be. It's just a lovely detail that is added in, but the issue for me was to be able to play Virgilia as a woman who had to obey social and political structures, and then to play Volumnia as a woman who utterly flouts those structures, has probably obeyed them in the past but has achieved such a level of authority and power that she now has total freedom.

  There's also the character of Valeria. It feels to me that Shakespeare was saying that this is the archetypal woman in this society, who is only interested in gossip and who very much holds the female line. It worked beautifully in our setting; she comes in delicately dressed and chats--that is what a woman does in this society. Volumnia has broken that paradigm but controls and oppresses poor Virgilia, who is unable to escape from this incredibly potent woman. She totally overshadows her. So when Martius comes home it is his mother he listens to rather than his wife. There is just no other room. I do think that sort of society is far more understandable when a mother and a daughter-in-law live in the same house. Immediately what that does for an audience is to throw them into another world and invite them to invest in the rules and codes of that world, rather than them imposing their own values and judgments. It's very easy to judge it from our value system where it would seem horrific. It requires a clear and compelling visual language that we can enter into and leave our own moral codes behind. This allows the play to become fresh in a way that I found very exciting.

  Doran: If your husband, meeting his fellow general in the field, says he is as happy to see him as he was to see his bride on her wedding night, then I don't think there is a lot going for that relationship! There was a wonderful moment in Terry Hands' production when the little
boy was brought in to meet his father dressed exactly as Coriolanus had been in Triumph. He was this new little soldier for Volumnia to play with. We didn't necessarily see that; I think the boy was as likely to despise as to emulate his father.

  8. "He is a lion / That I am proud to hunt": Coriolanus (Greg Hicks) and Aufidius (Chuk Iwuji) locked in combat in David Farr's 2002 production for the RSC.

  Some commentators, and productions, have detected a homoerotic element in the bond between Coriolanus and his mighty opponent Aufidius--that dream of wrestling on the battlefield ... did you explore this dimension?

  Farr: We explored it. We didn't choose to render it overt but it's in the language: the dream that Aufidius has of them fighting is a highly sexualized dream. I don't feel that in Shakespeare's time there would have been such embarrassment or shame about that. That's also true for Roman times of course, where homosexuality was treated in a completely different way. I think Shakespeare was exploring and enjoying that eroticization of the warrior. Again I go back to not wanting to modernize the play, not wanting to set it somewhere where these things become different to how they were. I think that is probably why this play is not quite as well known as Macbeth or Lear; the lead character is just as fascinating but it only really makes sense if you embrace that whole world. It has to have some journey from a world that is antiquarian and archaic to a world that we recognize.

  Doran: It would be very hard to ignore the theme of homoeroticism and surely willful to do so. The language is full of it, and not only Coriolanus' and Aufidius' language. The comedy servants at Aufidius' house in Antium describe how extravagantly he treats his new guest: "Our general himself makes a mistress of him." Each sees in the other a perfect male fighting machine. They excite each other. Aufidius calls Coriolanus "Thou noble thing" and admits when he sees him that his "rapt heart" dances. Both declare how much they love their wives, but how much more they worship each other (Martius has embraced Cominius on the battlefield, declaring that he is as happy as when he took his bride to bed on their wedding night [1.6.35-38]). Martius says of Aufidius when he is first introduced into the play in Act 1, "were I anything but what I am, / I would wish me only he." That reflected vanity is deeply narcissistic. When Martius hears that the Volsci have regathered their forces, all he wants to know is if Titus Lartius has seen Aufidius and whether Aufidius spoke of him. In an urgent little shared line he neatly expresses his obsession:

  CORIOLANUS Spoke he of me?

  LARTIUS He did, my lord.

  CORIOLANUS How? What?

  They even dream of one another. When Caius Martius arrives at Antium in Act 4, Aufidius, in his tumbling speech of obsessional adoration, admits "I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me: We have been down together in my sleep, Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat, And waked half dead with nothing." Even in a pre-Freudian world the analysis of that has to be pretty clear.

  What you do with that in performance, however, is key. We chose, noting the extravagancy of that language, to make the narcissism evident in their characters, and barely sublimated in the fight between them in Act 1. After all, male worship is a Roman obsession. Coriolanus admits he has always been "godded" by Rome, and by Menenius in particular. And his mother has an unhealthy interest in the precise number of her son's scars.

  And the staging of Coriolanus' death, the mood at the end of the play?

  Farr: The play started at the Swan Theatre and then ended at the Old Vic in London so the stage got bigger, but the bareness remained and was very important, because the heightened visual moments that we wanted were therefore achieved through very simple things. I used a very, very brilliant martial choreographer, Alasdair Monteith, to work alongside a more traditional fight director, Terry King. The Japanese setting also instigates a very interesting fighting style. Of course, the play is enormously about fighting and I spent much more time working on fighting than I would normally do, because fighting became as important as language in defining the emotional relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius. Their fight in the first half, their duel, was a powerful piece of theater because it was steeped in tradition, in a very strong code of honor. We set up that very strong choreographic code of Samurai swordplay. But then the play develops technologically, as I mentioned before, such as the typewriters used at the trial. Suddenly everything Coriolanus says is written down, which has never happened before, so in a powerful moment his words are thrown back at him. But the other main powerful moment of technology is the fight at the end. Coriolanus realizes that the Volscians wish to kill him and he takes out his sword to fight as a man of honor. Suddenly he is shot from behind by a gun. One of my favorite moments in our production was the total astonishment on his face when he realizes that someone has just shot him and that the era of his way of fighting is over. It was the crystallization of everything that the production was about in terms of the way in which the society was changing forever. It was the moment when this man realizes that everything he believes in has gone. It reminds me a little of when you see one of those wonderful old traditional Westerns when the cowboy realizes that all the codes and everything he's believed in has gone by: that quality of a vanishing world. There was a beautiful sense of heartbreak in that moment for him. At that point the Volscians just pour upon him like wolves and they literally rip him to shreds.

  Doran: The terrifying bloodbath is pitiful, and we couldn't but believe that Coriolanus somehow helps to incite it and immolates himself upon Aufidius' sword. When the frenzy is over the image of Aufidius standing on the body of his quondam partner is horrifying in its animal brutality. It seems to shock the lords of the city, who cry out for him to "Hold, hold, hold, hold!" Sublimated sexuality or not, the hunting imagery which runs throughout the description of their relationship culminates in this brutal triumphing over his enemy's body. And it is replaced as suddenly with horror at what he has done. In our production, Aufidius was left trying to lift the body of Coriolanus by himself, as the lords and even his co-conspirators drift away, leaving Aufidius to howl the final word: "Assist!"

  SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER

  IN THE THEATER

  BEGINNINGS

  William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

  Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare's childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a "star." The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

  Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically gr
and than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call "Marlowe's mighty line" sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

  He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain's Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself--he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson's plays as well as the list of actors' names at the beginning of his own collected works--but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain's Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.