In
anticipation of seeing The Old Globe production of Coriolanus this summer, I’ve
been doing some research on the play and familiarizing myself with its
particulars. It’s not a play that
I’ve ever seen performed live (although I have seen the 1984 BBC production on
DVD). As one of Shakespeare’s most
political plays – perhaps the most political – it has a history of being produced with an eye toward
whatever contemporary political viewpoint happens to be in vogue at the
moment. Which isn’t a bad thing –
if anything, it vindicates Shakespeare’s understanding of certain timeless
aspects of man as a political animal.
My own take on the play is that of Coriolanus as a kind of Conservative
Überhero; in him I see shades of Sen. John McCain, Gen. Odierno, President
Eisenhower, and even Dick Cheney.
Just as Dick Cheney famously said, “So?” (with respect to public
opinion), so Coriolanus is equally contemptuous of the “voices” of the common
people. A recent post on
RedState.com echoed this deeply felt conservative notion that the ideal state
of man is a kind of lofty detachment from the petty concerns of mere humans:
…concede nothing (you can always agree, but you do not concede); you keep going back to a disputed point over and over again until they get tired of trying to sneak one past you;
[snip]
…you don’t accept the other side’s presumptuous bluff that they speak for the American people. Because they don’t.
And you don’t give a tinker’s dam if they like you afterward. To quote Truman: if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
This is pure Coriolanus: a powerful and successful military man who is a god-awful politician, a man of principle who won’t suffer fools even at the price of his life, a patrician colossus who acts as though civility, humility and humanity were mortal weaknesses. In her excellent essay on Coriolanus in her book, Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber makes the following points:
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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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 feeling, who was safe so long as he regarded himself as a monster without kin or a lonely dragon in his fen. Shockingly, 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, friend – that he becomes really vulnerable. For this act of simple human recognition he is murdered.
Unlike many modern conservatives, Coriolanus
is not necessarily a figure to be mocked... but his story and theirs eerily mirror each other.
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