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Coriolanus (Folger Shakespeare Library)

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Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" is a virulent attack on both democracy and the exploitative nature of the aristocracy. In the world depicted a particular social class dominates and prospers when the occasion calls upon the virtues of that particular class. It concerns a Roman warrior named Coriolanus who is eventually seen as a threat to Roman democracy and is expelled from the city by the tribunes (the spokesmen of the plebians). When the plebians banish him the play indicates that civil strife has ended and a period of peace then reigns. Once the banished Coriolanus joins forces with Rome's enemies, the Volscians, and threatens war, the limitations of the tribunes are then layed bare and a upper class (the patricians) is called upon in order to defend against the enemy. Only war brings the two classes together. Shakespeare sees intrinsic psychological traits in both classes. The patricians are arrogant and do not know how to segregate the values of war from the values needed in peace time. The plebians, on the other hand are fickle, shallow and weak. They are depicted as extraordinarily stupid (unrealistically so) and easily duped. Shakespeare seems to postulate the need for both classes with power tipping to one side or the other dependent on the circumstances of the time, and the unavoidable class conflict between them is presented as an eternal, tragic and unavoidable social reality. It is a well thought out but ultimately shallow political philosophy, in my opinion. In Shakespeare's defense he lived in a much less civilized culture than democratic Athens or even republican Rome and his common people may not have had the educational advantages necessary to ably control the state. Yet a republican government would have gone a long way towards compensating for these limitations. Despite all his brilliance he was not enough of a visionary to see the coming of bourgeois democracy.

So our virtues
Lie in the interpretation of the time:
And power, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair [public platform]
To extol what it hath done.
One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail; [one class the other]
Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
Come, let's away.
Act IV, Scene VII (lines 52 - 60)

The characters in the play are mostly without depth (a major abandonment of the poet's greatest gift - the ability to create characters as real and complex as ourselves) but Shakespeare shines when it comes to the relationship between Coriolanus and Volumnia, his mother. Coriolanus is famously the creation of his overbearing mother. She raised him for war and her mothering created a stunted man-child with no understanding of what it means to exist in a complex society in times of peace. When he is banished he betrays his own country and joins the enemy in order to sack his own city. Coriolanus has no soliloquies (surprising in a Shakespeare play). It could be argued that he is too limited a consciousness to have any interiority at all. There is also very little poetry in the language of the play.

Sophocles in his "Antigone" and Euripides in his minor works wrote profound political works touching upon the role of the state and the threat it could pose to greater social and spiritual values. Advocates of both democracy and tyranny were allowed to debate and have their say. In Shakespeare's tragedy the characters simply yell over one another and no dialectic takes place. This denies the play an opportunity at expanding its political commentary. I personally find the anti-democratic nature of the play considerably loathsome. After the anti-semitic "The Merchant of Venice" it strikes me as being his most backwards play. It is a harsh and disturbing work but not without its own twisted and subtle genius.