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Coriolanus
If I'm allowed to join in only having read the play and seen the BBC version, count me in. I probably won't see the film for some time, lack of funds...
I would like to engage in reading the play, but not if it is merely to be an adjunct to seeing this film.I think we need a proper reading schedule, starting on date x with so many days per scene etc, as before. Is that planned?
Mod
Martin, yes we had discussed this and agreed to a reading of the play. We set a date too, remember? The dvd is something I am looking forward to and will be added. Maybe your home page doesn't show the upcoming reading selection? (it's been posted for a month or so)
:)
Ah yes, I did see it, but I think a schedule for scene reads, as we did for plays in the past, really helps the quality of the read. Shall I put one in? It's only a matter of counting and division.
and candee u terible speler, its "coriolanus" not "corilianus" [image error]
Mod
I posted this topic last night at work...and was in a rush...sorry about poor spelling (typo on iPad...to save face?)
And yes, I am a miserable speller. I've always said I could murder any word.
:)
I come equipped with the Oxford. I dig the cover:
A new Arden, the 3rd, was meant to be out before this time; publication postponed til late in the year.
The Oxford index includes:
Interpretation
--Political
--Psychological
--Existential
Why does that strike me as funny? Is it the schematic layout?
I can't spell either, Candy, though I make efforts to disguise that fact. My excuse has always been, correct spelling is a modern concept, post-Shakespearean.
Mod
We can all take comfort in the realization that nobody thinks English spelling is easy. For four and a half centuries, those who have resented its complexities have fought for simplification and reform. They have wanted to take it upon themselves to regularize patterns, cut out letters, remove exceptions, or replace the alphabet altogether. George Bernard Shaw could not understand why we should wish to live with a language in which fish might as well be spelled ghoti (f as in cough, i as in women, and sh as in nation). Margeret Visser
Mod
Okay gang, here's a reading schedule, intended as an aid so we know where everyone else should roughly be, It takes account of the widely differing scene sizes in this play,
1.1 29 May - 1 Jun
1.2-1.3 2 Jun
1.4-1.5 3 Jun
1.6-1.7 4 Jun
1.8-1.10 5 Jun
2.1 6 - 8 Jun
2.2 9 - 10 Jun
2.3 11 - 12 Jun
3.1 13 - 15 Jun
3.2 16 - 17 Jun
3.3 18 - 19 Jun
4.1-4.4 20 - 21 Jun
4.5 22 - 23 Jun
4.6 24 Jun
4.7 25 Jun
5.1 26 Jun
5.2 27 Jun
5.3-5.4 28 - 29 Jun
5.5-5.6 30 Jun - 1 Jul
Sounds good. Count me in. There's nothing on my home page about these dates.(I wish we could do a reading of my favourite play at a later date, 'All's Well'too.)
Re spelling, I'm dyslexic, and type too fast! Always loved the way Shakespeare could vary his spellings...
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Mod
"suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain ...."It may be ancient Rome, but this anxiety is very Elizabethan/Jacobean. Jonson followed his very congenial Every man in his humour with the much darker, and less popular Every man out of his humour. I read these last year. EMOOHH is a bit like Moliere's Misanthrope: the hero is confronted with examples of base behaviour which disgust him. One such example is a farmer who hoards grain in a time of shortage, knowing the price will go up. The gloating of the rogue fills a long scene. The same idea pops up in Macbeth, in a single cryptic line,
"Here's a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty ..."
What this means is that a farmer speculated with grain, in the belief the price had to go up. When better weather promised a plentiful harvest he was ruined and hanged himself -- a bit like the stories of the suicides that followed the Wall St crash.
The idea that rich farmers were starving and robbing the populace was clearly widely believed by the urban playgoing audiences of the day.
I've read the Livy and Plutarch versions of the Coriolanus story "as preparation", and am rather wishing I hadn't: they differ from each other and S naturally differs again, and I get confused remembering which was which. Livy's account is more historical, Plutarch's more biographical. In Livy, C's mother is Veturia, his wife Volumnia, and Aufridius becomes "Attius Tullius". C's end, in Livy is obscure. S follows Plutarch, although the story in Livy is so close to that of Lucrece (Lucretia) that S must surely have known it. In Plutarch this jumps out at you,
"other men were brave in order to win glory, but Marcius won glory in order to please his mother",
echoed in S's,
"though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country he did it to please his mother ..."
The fable of the belly, incidentally, is told by Menenius in both Livy and Plutarch, though in a slightly earlier context.
Anyway, that's enough about Livy and Plutarch!
I've read Plutarch on Mark Anthony and Brutus, but not Coriolanus. Must follow that one up!
I've read Plutarch on Mark Anthony and Brutus, but not Coriolanus. Must follow that one up!
Mod
Well, I didn't mention Plutarch (and Livy) to encourage reading the sources, but rather because I didn't want to be the first to charge in with opinions about Act 1 scene 1. I was hoping to elicit other comments .... My plan seems to have gone a bit wrong there.
Mod
I am not reading Plutarch to inform me during this discussion. Just thinking out loud, but I suppose it did appear that suddenly I was going to use some kind of secondary source ha ha.
I've read Scene 1 a couple of times now.
It's difficult to not think of Occupy Wall Street...
:)
Mod
In that case I'll leap in with 1.1 comments though undercooked. Before our Martius walks in:
The part I have to take when I read this aloud is First Citizen. He's great. You've got to like how he interrupts Menenius whether or not he has aught to say - just for the sake of interruption, and I enjoy to voice his interjections, think up a voice for them. Besides this he says nothing unjust, and neither do any of the mob in 1.1. No? Is that me? They are fair and more than fair in discussing particular patricians.
Then Martius is the voice to be: he has a great voice too. I'll wait for others' Martius comments. I do not dislike him. And when he starts to talk about Tullus Aufidius, that's one of my favourite types of story: enemies fascinated by each other or closer to each other than they are to their friends.
Mod
I thought this bit was rather wonderful:
"but they think we are too dear: the leanness that
afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an
inventory to particularise their abundance; "
Oooh, yes the motives and dialogues between enemies is so rich and compelling isn't it?
Oh, I figured that, Candy. Me too. And since I'm the sort to stand with the Occupy people, I wonder whether I'm objective? But who's objective??-My Oxford intro has in the Stage History section, 'Right-wing Interpretation' and 'Left-wing Interpretation'. I have to think you interpret to your own politics. Do others think there's an objectivity, can be, ought to be? Is this too heavy a question early on?
Oh, thank goodness it's not just me! Instead of looking at the poetry, all I am doing is thinking about the politics, which I know is the wrong approach. (Or is that what S is really inviting?) A 25 year interest in Roman history is almost a handicap. I am fascinated, for example, by the reinterpretation of political struggle you see here. Livy sees things from the 1st century BC perspective. Menenius is one of the Optimates, and in his fable of the belly promotes a Ciceronian "concordia ordinum" idea (you'll have to google this if you don't know what I'm on about.) Livy sees the events of 550BC from the viewpoint of 50BC. S sees Livy from a viewpoint 1500 years later. Examples abound, but you can compare the views on the cause of the famine, either racketeering (first citizen) or act of god (Menenius). In S's time, economic problems were often seen as acts of God, I've just dug this quote out of Conrad Russell's "Crisis of Parliaments""some people blamed five successive bad harvests on God's displeasure with the King's [Henry 8] religious policy..."
The point being that after a bad harvest the price of everything, including manufactured goods, went up.
-- and then our view of things, 400 years after S.
One difference with Occupy today is that then a senator went among the people and engaged them in peaceful debate, whereas now he'd just send in a police force with batons and pepper sprays.
- - - -
"Martius has a great voice too" -- Brynn.
But I see a real difference here. Compare the poetry of Menenius and "first citizen",
I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain....
The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye,
The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier,
Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter.
-- with Coriolanus,
What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?
The former show an expanding imagination, with the active mind creating novel similes, the last a simile used to reinforce a prejudiced mind that cannot expand.
I feel (and I think the BBC Coriolanus I lent Jessica shows) that mentally there is something seriously wrong with Coriolanus. It isn't so much the opinions (compromise is mere weakness, a dislike of war mere cowardice), as his style of language, in the verse S ascribes to him.
Fascinating comments, everyone!Candy, which is your version, as I'd be fascinated to read about those 'left wing' and 'right wing' interpretations? There really wasn't anything interesting like that in the Arden edition I read, I was disappointed in the analysis.
Coriolanus' is certainly contemptous of the commoners in the first scene, calling them 'fragments' 'I'd make a quarry of thousands of these quarter'd slaves as high as I could pick my lance' and so on, but the 'rabble' are not shown to advantage by running away from him. I thought it a pity they weren't depicted as having more courage.
Presumably Coriolanus' mother is meant to have failed to nurture any softness in him at all in general (just a bit towards his wife and son later on; when he shows that, he's much more sympathic, of course).
Coriolanus is no poet. A damaged person, and a damaged speech, I won't argue... though he has a vigour in his rough tongue that I enjoy to read aloud. Hang ye. Trust ye? What you quote from First Citizen: he talks back to Menenius in verse, after the usual prose for the commons - and I like his sudden poetry more than M.'s dull old tale?? - my opinion - I'd be bored if First didn't interrupt him. Though M. is much enriched by his humour, too.
Do you think Martius turns to the subject of the wars and Aufidius with a different note, and I dare to say even, with a poetry now? He's at home in the wars and nowhere else.
Jessie wrote: "Candy, which is your version, as I'd be fascinated to read about those 'left wing' and 'right wing' interpretations? There really wasn't anything interesting like th..."Hi Jessie. I'm the one with the 'Left-wing' and 'Right-wing' in The Oxford Shakespeare, editor R.B. Parker; though I meant to leave the introduction until I've read the play. You can change my mind at once.
Was yours the Second Series Arden, editor Philip Brockbank? There is a new Third Series Arden due out in November, editor Peter Holland. I hope, with much more to say. A few of Thirds have been great steps up from the Seconds.
Yes, I think his mother is a psychopath, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.
Hi, Bryn, thanks for info, and you're right, we should discuss the introduction afterwards! I think I'll order the Oxfrod one from the library (how they hate the sight of me, as they reach for a inter-library loan form).Yes, mine was the second, very intellectual, but not stimulating, somehow. Dry.
Yes, Coriolanus comes from a 'dysfunctional family' shall we say? but again, you are right, we must wait to discuss that...
(Jessie, you terrible duplicate poster, could you kill messages 13, 18, 35? [image error]) I thought the "rabble" did not run away from Coriolanus, but merely drifted off. Brynn, I think you haven't quite taken my point about the lines given to Coriolanus. I'm not suggesting they're poetically inferior (which your "Coriolanus is no poet" seems to imply), but only that they illustrate a limitation of character. Anyway, S's characters may speak verse, but only S is the poet, surely. The characters sometimes disclaim, but never claim poetic ability (as in "Oh Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers.")
Mod
Martin, I don't know why I keep making duplicate posts, I'm not doing anything different. What setting could I have accidentally pressed? Well, perhaps they skulked off, but it does come across as pusillanimous after the talk before; maybe that's not fair, and they are more people with short attention spans.
All the patricians seem to take the view that the common people are somehow contemptible, it's just that Coriolanus doesn't disguise it. It's interesting the way it is the same in 'Julius Caeser' where Casca calls them 'the common rabblement' etc and the high minded Brutus says he wouldn't demean himself by accepting their 'trash', unlike Cassius. In real life didn't Mark Anthony abuse Augustus Ceaser as a descendant of a man whose 'filthy hands' shaped bread? There's a complete contempt for the masses depicted in these Roman plays.
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I like what you say Jessie about Coriolanus doesn't disguise his contempt. I also think he must be pretty pissed and wish he had respect for what he has done, at least in his own mind, for the citizens.
This interests me and I may not be understanding what is going on here...but it seems like Marcius Coriolanus has done great defense and he feels he deserves respect. He also is taking the blame for food shortages and hard life of the common people. Perhaps they expected quick changes in lifestyle?
So if I get what tension is going on...it is easy to see both sides, the regular people versus the governments own perceptions of the "dues" they have paid. So in a small way...I can see how he feels his citizenry is ungrateful.
What exactly is the problem and why is grain and corn so expensive?
The events in this play mirror events in Elizabethan times where there were food shortages.
I think this play might turn out to be a fabulous window into how Shakespeare uses the past in much the same way that many sci-fi writers use the future. Moving into the past or the future helps an artist make critical observations of contemporary culture (without getting into trouble with the political powers).
I think some of his love stories hide political and moral in metaphors...and here this play might be a lot easier to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Yes, what Jessie says about patricians' contempt throughout. Here, I don't much like Menenius' last speech to the First Citizen, right after he's been joking with him - abruptly, a real contempt. First Citizen isn't a rascal. And I almost like Coriolanus just for being honest... that comes out later. The Second Citizen forgives much in Coriolanus for 'his services to his country', and even the First grudgingly backs down to 'partly for his mother, partly to be proud'. (His mother already, and from a citizen?) They have a gratitude for his services, a generous one in Second's case.
Later in this act we see Coriolanus can't stand public recognition for his military achievements. So I don't think his complaint against the citizens is about himself.
The 'pride' too that they insist he has in great proportions is challenged in the next few scenes. It's a funny sort of pride if he has it.
Marcius/MartiusThe first version I read had him as 'Marcius'. Then the Oxford and a Penguin I have both go with 'Martius'. The Penguin explains:
The correct form of the hero's name in Latin is Caius Marcius. 'Martius' is preferred in this edition, contrary to the practice of most editors, for three reasons: it is consistently so given in the Folio; it was the form Shakespeare found in North and in Holland's translation of Livy; it indicates, and may even have influenced, Shakespeare's view of Coriolanus's character. He is a 'son of Mars'.
I hated the Marcius first time around - such a common name, and with too soft a sound for him. Couldn't wait until he earnt his name Coriolanus. But 'Martius' is great, suits him.
Candy wrote: "I think this play might turn out to be a fabulous window into how Shakespeare uses the past in much the same way that many sci-fi writers use the future. Moving into the past or the future helps an artist make critical observations of contemporary culture (without getting into trouble with the political powers)"Fascinated by this, this in science fiction or in historical fiction, and I bet Shakespeare wasn't behindhand in these usages.
When yet he was but tender-bodied... To a cruel war I sent him-His mother, 1.3. But it isn't only his mother, it's the women of Rome: a friend of the family tells the infamous butterfly story.
This is his mother's fantasy of him:
Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus:
'Come on, you cowards! You were got in fear,
Though you were born in Rome.' His bloody brow
With his mailed hand then wiping...
We'll shortly see him talk like this, and act this out, bloody as she describes.
PS. on the schedule. It's the 3rd in Australia, the 2nd for most of you? I may get ahead.
Like Bryn, I found Menenius' abuse of "1st citizen" offensive. And yes, the similarity of S (although one should not take it too far I think) with modern Sci Fi, as S seems to create his own "other worlds" and show how people would behave within them.I think 1.2 comes alive at the moment Aufidius fumbles to find the letter from his Roman spy. Why does that work so well?
S's "Martius" spelling is very interesting. The editions are really inconsistent here --- Ahenobarbus is always left as "Enobarbus", but Martius gets "corrected" to "Marcius".
The correct Latin name, as in Livy, is definitely "caius marcius coriolanus", Plutarch (Πλούταρχος) transliterates it as "Γάιος Μάρκιος Κοριολάνος" (gaios markios koriolanos), Amyot translates it into French as "Gaius Martius Coriolanus", North, who translated the French of Amyot, not the Greek of Plutarch, made it "Caius Martius Coriolanus", and S took it from North.
I've spent a nightmarish 2 hours with google putting that useless bit of information together!
Candy asks, "What exactly is the problem and why is grain and corn so expensive?", but I think we're just expected to accept that it is, and not search for the answer outside the text of the play. It so happens that Livy does give an answer, that work in the fields had been neglected in a time of civil unrest, but the context is not quite the same: Menenius talking to the people and the creation of tribunes is part of "the secession of the plebs", as it is called, in 494 BC. The Coriolanus story (by which time, in Livy, Menenius has died) comes later. S runs the two things together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessio...
Menenius describes the body politic as the organs of a real body working in harmony. Coriolanus repeatedly describes the common people as vermin, or a sickness that infects the body. Contrasting metaphors.
I think this is interesting:
You shames of Rome! you herd of -- Boils and plagues
Plaster you o'er, that you may be abhorr'd
Further than seen and one infect another
Against the wind a mile!
Note the dash, introduced by all modern editors to unscramble the syntax. But what S wrote was this, if we can trust the 1st Folio,
You Shames of Rome: you Heard of Byles and Plagues
Plaister you o'er, that you may be abhorr'd
Farther than seene, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile:
see http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/me...
And restored in this way, you can see a late-Shakespeare effect of the metaphor of the soldiers being boils and plagues switching mid-sentence to becoming a curse of what they should be infected with.
Coriolanus seems to be talking germ warfare here: even with men a mile apart with the wind in the wrong direction, the disease will spread.
(Hey, I hope I'm not becoming the only poster!)Volumnia as psychomom (Brynn) -- very plausible after 1.3. But then we might see Coriolanus as a roman Rambo. winning his battles almost singlehandedly.
Kermode, in Shakespeare's Language points out the silence in 1.3, very easy to miss in the read. The silence is Virgilia's, who says little, but is the centre of interest. To me, Virgilia is "normal", Volumnia almost a parody of the raw virtues that later Romans liked to believe were widespread in the city's early history.
For a quite different take, my "Plays of William Shakespeare" (published 1823) has with each play Dr Johnson's 18th century judgement. His opinion of Coriolanus really surprised me,
"The tragedy of Coriolanus is one of the most amusing of our author's performances. The old man's merriment in Menenius; the lofty lady's dignity in Volumina; the bridal modesty in Virgilia; the patrician and military haughtiness in Coriolanus; the plebeian malignity and tribunitarian insolence in Brutus and Sicinius, make a very pleasing and interesting variety: and the various revolutions of the hero's fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity. There is, perhaps, too much bustle in the first act, and too little in the last."
I think he should have read it again ....
If there's a better battle scene in Shakespeare I want to know where. Scenes that is, 1.4-10. I know I'm partial to a battle scene but I'd have followed him into the gates, I swear.
Sorry for lack of posts, I had to finish a great long book on Pushkin quickly (I wonder what he would have made of Coriolanus?) Fascinating posts, everyone. I'm re-reading the first scene now, behind schedule, I know. I'll try and catch up, sorry, everyone! Johnson's view is intriguing, 'plebian malignity' eh?
Mod
the yarn she spun in Ulysses' absence did but fill
Ithaca full of moths. Come; I would your cambric
were sensible as your finger, that you might leave
pricking it for pity.
Then Marcius...You souls of geese,
That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell!
All hurt behind; backs red, and faces pale
With flight and agued fear! Mend and charge home,
Or, by the fires of heaven,
What I think will always amaze me is that S makes something I think would be so boring ...so very poetic and interesting.
The contrast I feel between the women stitching and the men analyzing and looking down at the battle is highlighting how we break down people...or it sits with me like that...
I think there is a possibility to conflate the roles of the women with the sense of violence and power struggles of the men. I find myself trying to watch for words demeaning Marcius...in a feminie way...
Who sensibly outdares his senseless sword,
And, when it bows, stands up.
I don't know exactly what is tweaking for me with but its there....
Worthy sir, thou bleed'st;
Thy exercise hath been too violent
Fascinating, Candy. They sit them down and sew... right, I've read the first six scenes.
I think Volumnia must have wanted to be a soldier herself, though, and frustrated by a patriarchal order, made her son into almost a cardboard cut out of a warrior as a result...
Valeria is intriguing; later, C praises her (I think mainly for her 'virtue' though (did the Romans ever value that in a woman). She is all for the tearing up of the butterly; the women, presumably, have taken on the martial values of Rome.
On my first reading Virgilia came across to me as unrealised, a doting wife, full stop, and as she is gentle compared to his mother, presumably Coriolanus finds it a bit of a relief by contrast.
I think it shows how hard it was for women to wait at home in suspense (no mobile phones then, imagine Coriolanus on one abusing the plebs), much easier to be in the thick of it, knowing what was happening, but that's probably just me!
The battle scenes are stimulating, Coriolanus' abuse of the retreating troops, getting locked alone within the city, a bit of humour where the soldiers think he will be cut up fit for a cooking pot, his coming on Cominius looking like 'a flayed man' and wanting to fight on. It's very succinct.
(Jessie, I'd like to take another view of the BBC Coriolanus ... you couldn't get it back to me please?)
Asap, Martin. Really sorry I have taken so long to retgurn it, problems with getting any time to see the second dvd (as usual). Will it be OK if I send it off before the Cymbeline one?
thanks Jessie, that will be fine! No need to return Cymbeline.
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Coriolanus (other topics)
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