Even with all that, I haven’t studied it: the play needs more close reading and disciplined thinking than I’ve done to come to at least some terms with it.
But here’s one heterodox thought about it.
The standard line on the play is that Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s “most political play.”
But I dissent.
I get the class issue between the plebeians and the patricians.
I get the plebeians’ dire circumstances due lack of food, and the patricians’ corruption—the charging of usurious rates for corn, their surfeit of it.
I get the danger of Coriolanus as potential autocrat stripping the people of such power as they have and, so, the issue of republican governance versus autocracy.
I get how the many, the mob, the people, are fickle and easily manipulated.
I get how success in politics requires dissembling.
And I see other issues too that sound in the political.
But they all seem to me subordinate to what I see as the play’s emphatically central focus, which is Coriolanus himself, his nature, his relation to all that’s around him—personal, political and events, his moral stature or lack of it, his great strengths and great weaknesses, the tragedy that attends him, the question of his nobility, if any, how he came to be who he is—on one hand, he’s a killing machine, a “thing,” in battle; on the other, he’s a mama’s boy. All the rest, what all else sounds in the political, is context for what, who and how he is and how he moves in his world, pregnant and substantial as that context is.
I can see the two Henry plays being arguably more thematically political with their central concern the making of a king as ruler. I’d argue that Falstaff’s banishment Hal as King is more overtly, concretely, specifically and thematically political than any one thing in Coriolanus.
I’m more than happy to be disagreed with.
No comments:
Post a Comment