B. ?
R. Have I left something out?
B. Are Marcius’ services mentioned?
R. And disputed.
P. So you think the plebeians aren’t all that united? Yet they loudly proclaim their determination.
W. Too loudly. If you proclaim your determination as loudly as that it means that you are or were undetermined, and highly so.
P. In the normal theatre this determination always has something comic about it: it makes the plebeians seem ridiculous, particularly as their weapons are inadequate: clubs, staves. Then they collapse right away, just because the patrician Agrippa makes a fine speech.
B. Not in Shakespeare.
P. But in the bourgeois theatre.
B. Indeed yes.
R. This is awkward. You cast doubt on the plebeians’ determination, yet you bar the comic element. Does that mean that you think after all that they won’t let themselves be taken in by the patricians’ demagogy? So as not to seem more comic still?
B. If they let themselves be taken in I wouldn’t find them comic but tragic. That would be a possible scene, for such things happen, but a horrifying one. I don’t think you realize how hard it is for the oppressed to become united. Their misery unites them—once they recognize who has caused it. “Our sufferance is a gain to them.” But otherwise their misery is liable to cut them off from one another, for they are forced to snatch the wretched crumbs from each other’s mouths. Think how reluctantly men decide to revolt! It’s an adventure for them: new paths have to be marked out and followed; moreover the rule of the rulers is always accompanied by that of their ideas. To the masses revolt is the unnatural rather than the natural thing, and however bad the situation from which only revolt can free them they find the idea of it as exhausting as the scientist finds a new view of the universe. This being so it is often the more intelligent people who are opposed to unity and only the most intelligent of all who are also for it.
R. So really the plebeians have not become united at all?
B. On the contrary. Even the second citizen joins in. Only neither we nor the audience must be allowed to overlook the contradictions that are bridged over, suppressed, ruled out, now that sheer hunger makes a conflict with the patricians unavoidable.
R. I don’t think you can find that in the text, just like that.
B. Quite right. You have got to have read the whole play. You can’t begin without having looked at the end. Later in the play this unity of the plebeians will be broken up, so it is best not to take it for granted at the start, but to show it as having come about.
W. How?
B. We’ll discuss that. I don’t know. For the moment we are making an analysis. Go on.
R. The next thing that happens is that the patrician Agrippa enters, and proves by a parable that the plebeians cannot do without the rule of the patricians.
B. You say “proves” as if it were in quotes.
R. The parable doesn’t convince me.
B. It’s a world-famous parable. Oughtn’t you to be objective?
R. Yes.
B. Right.
W. The man starts off by suggesting that the dearth has been made by the gods, not the patricians.
P. That was a valid argument in those days, in Rome I mean. Don’t the interests of a given work demand that we respect the ideology of a given period?
B. You needn’t go into that here. Shakespeare gives the plebeians good arguments to answer back with. And they strongly reject the parable, for that matter.
R. The plebeians complain about the price of corn, the rate of usury, and are against the burden of the war, or at any rate its unjust division.
B. You’re reading that into it.
R. I can’t find anything against war.
B. There isn’t.
R. Marcius comes on and abuses the armed plebeians, whom he would like to see handled with the sword, not with speeches. Agrippa plays the diplomat and says that the plebeians want corn at their own rates. Marcius jeers at them. They don’t know what they are talking about, having no access to the Capitol and therefore no insight into the state’s affairs. He gets angry at the suggestion that there’s grain enough.
P. Speaking as a military man, presumably.
W. In any case as soon as war breaks out he points to the Volsces’ corn.
R. During his outburst Marcius announces that the Senate has now granted the plebeians people’s tribunes, and Agrippa finds this strange. Enter senators, with the incumbent consul Cominius at their head. Marcius is delighted at the idea of fighting the Volscian leader Aufidius. He is put under Cominius’ command.
B. Is he agreeable to that?
R. Yes. But it seems to take the senators slightly by surprise.
B. Differences of opinion between Marcius and the senate?
R. Not important ones.
B. We’ve read the play to the end, though. Marcius is an awkward man.
W. It’s interesting, this contempt for the plebeians combined with high regard for a national enemy, the patrician Aufidius. He’s very class-conscious.
B. Forgotten something?
R. Yes. Sicinius and Brutus, the new people’s tribunes, came on with the senators.
B. No doubt you forgot them because they got no welcome or greeting.
R. Altogether the plebeians get very little further attention. A senator tells them sharply to go home. Marcius “humorously” suggests that they should rather follow him to the Capitol. He treats them as rats, and that is when he refers them to the corn of the Volsces. Then it just says, “Citizens steal away.”
P. The play makes their revolt come at an unfortunate moment. In the crisis following the enemy’s approach the patricians can seize the reins once more.
B. And the granting of people’s tribunes?
P. Was not really necessary.
R. Left alone, the tribunes hope that the war, instead of leading to Marcius’ promotion, will devour him, or make him fall out with the senate.
P. The end of the scene is a little unsatisfactory.
B. In Shakespeare, you mean?
R. Possibly.
B. We’ll note that sense of discomfort. But Shakespeare presumably thinks that war weakens the plebeians’ position, and that seems to me splendidly realistic.
B. Beautiful things.
R. The wealth of events in a single short scene. Compare today’s plays, with their poverty of content!
P. The way in which the exposition at the same time gives a rousing send-off to the plot!
R. The language in which the parable is told! The humour!
P. And the fact that it has no effect on the plebeians!
W. The plebeians’ native wit! Exchanges like “Agrippa: Will you undo yourselves? Citizen: We cannot, sir, we are undone already!”
R. The crystal clarity of Marcius’ harangue! What an outsize character! And one who emerges as admirable while behaving in a way that I find beneath contempt!
B. And great and small conflicts all thrown on the scene at once: the unrest of the starving plebeians plus the war against their neighbours the Volsces; the plebeians’ hatred for Marcius, the people’s enemy—plus his patriotism; the creation of the post of people’s tribune—plus Marcius’ appointment to a leading role in the war. Well—how much of that do we see in the bourgeois theatre?
W. They usually use the whole scene for an exposition of Marcius’ character: the hero. He’s shown as a patriot, handicapped by selfish plebeians and a cowardly and weak-kneed senate. Shakespeare, following Livy rather than Plutarch, has good reason for showing the senate “sad and confused by a double fear—fear of the people and fear of the enemy.” The bourgeois stage identifies itself with the patricians’ cause, not the plebeians’. The plebeians are shown as comic and pathetic types (rather than types who bear misfortune with humour), and Agrippa’s remark labelling the senate’s granting of people’s tribunes as strange is used for the light it casts on Agrippa’s character rather than to establ
ish a preliminary link between the advance of the Volsces and the concessions made to the plebeians. The plebeians’ unrest is of course settled at once by the parable of the belly and the members, which is just right for the bourgeoisie’s taste, as shown in its relations with the modern proletariat.…
R. Although Shakespeare never allows Agrippa to mention that his parable has managed to convince the plebeians, only to say that though they lack discretion (to understand his speech) they are passing cowardly—an accusation, incidentally, that’s impossible to understand.
B. We’ll note that.
R. Why?
B. It gives rise to discomfort.
R. I must say, the way in which Shakespeare treats the plebeians and their tribunes rather encourages our theatre’s habit of letting the hero’s hardships be aggravated as far as possible by the “foolish” behaviour of the people, and so paving the way in anticipatory forgiveness for the later excesses of his “pride.”
B. All the same Shakespeare does make a factor of the patricians’ corn profiteering and their inclination at least to conscript the plebeians for war—Livy makes the patricians say something to the effect that the base plebs always goes astray in peacetime—and of the plebeians’ unjust indebtedness to the nobles. In such ways Shakespeare refrains from presenting the revolt as a piece of pure folly.
W. But nor does he do much to bring out Plutarch’s interesting phrase: “Once order had been restored in the city by these means, even the lower classes immediately flocked to the colours and showed the greatest willingness to let the ruling authorities employ them for the war.”
B. All right; if that’s so we’ll read the phrase with all the more interest: we want to find out as much about the plebeians as we can.
P. “For it may be a question of characteristics of famous ancestors.”
R. There’s another point where Shakespeare refrains from coming down on the aristocratic side. Marcius isn’t allowed to make anything of Plutarch’s remark that “The turbulent attitude of the base plebs did not go unobserved by the enemy. He launched an attack and put the country to fire and sword.”
B. Let’s close our first analysis at this point. Here is roughly what takes place and what we must bring out in the theatre. The conflict between patricians and plebeians is (at least provisionally) set aside, and that between the Romans and the Volsces becomes all-predominant. The Romans, seeing their city in danger, legalize their differences by appointing plebeian commissars (people’s tribunes). The plebeians have got the tribunate, but the people’s enemy Marcius emerges, qua specialist, as leader in war.
B. The brief analysis we made yesterday raises one or two very suggestive problems of production.
W. How can one show that there has been opposition to the plebeians uniting, for instance? Just by that questionable emphasis on determination?
R. When I told the story I didn’t mention their lack of unity because I took the second citizen’s remarks as a provocation. He struck me as simply checking on the first citizen’s firmness. But I don’t suppose it can be played in this way. It’s more that he’s still hesitating.
W. He could be given some reason for his lack of warlike spirit. He could be better dressed, more prosperous. When Agrippa makes his speech he could smile at the jokes, and so on. He could be disabled.
R. Weakness?
W. Morally speaking. The burnt child returns to its fire.
B. What about their weapons?
R. They’ve got to be poorly armed, or they could have got the tribunate without the Volsces’ attacking; but they mustn’t be weak, or they could never win the war for Marcius and the war against him.
B. Do they win their war against Marcius?
R. In our theatre, certainly.
P. They can go in rags, but does that mean they have to go raggedly?
B. What’s the situation?
R. A sudden popular rising.
B. So presumably their weapons are improvised ones, but they can be good improvisers. It’s they who make the army’s weapons; who else? They can have got themselves bayonets, butchers’ knives on broom-handles, converted fire-irons, etc. Their inventiveness can arouse respect, and their arrival can immediately seem threatening.
P. We’re talking about the people all the time. What about the hero? He wasn’t even the centre of R.’s summary of the content.
R. The first thing shown is a civil war. That’s something too interesting to be mere background preparation for the entrance of the hero. Am I supposed to start off: “One fine morning Caius Marcius went for a stroll in his garden, went to the market place, met the people and quarrelled,” and so on? What bothers me at the moment is how to show Agrippa’s speech as ineffective and having an effect.
W. I’m still bothered by P.’s question whether we oughtn’t to examine the events with the hero in mind. I certainly think that before the hero’s appearance one is entitled to show the field of forces within which he operates.
B. Shakespeare permits that. But haven’t we perhaps overloaded it with particular tensions, so that it acquires a weight of its own?
P. And Coriolanus is written for us to enjoy the hero!
R. The play is written realistically, and includes sufficient material of a contradictory sort. Marcius fighting the people: that isn’t just a plinth for his monument.
B. Judging from the way you’ve treated the story it seems to me that you’ve insisted all of you from the first on smacking your lips over the tragedy of a people that has a hero against it. Why not follow this inclination?
P. There may not be much pretext for that in Shakespeare.
R. I doubt it. But we don’t have to do the play if we don’t enjoy it.
P. Anyway, if we want to keep the hero as the centre of interest we can also play Agrippa’s speech as ineffective.
W. As Shakespeare makes it. The plebeians receive it with jeers, pityingly even.
R. Why does Agrippa mention their cowardice—the point I was supposed to note?
P. No evidence for it in Shakespeare.
B. Let me emphasize that no edition of Shakespeare has stage directions, apart from those presumed to have been added later.
P. What’s the producer to do?
B. We’ve got to show Agrippa’s (vain) attempt to use ideology, in a purely demagogic way, in order to bring about that union between plebeians and patricians which in reality is effected a little—not very much—later by the outbreak of war. Their real union is due to force majeure, thanks to the military power of the Volsces. I’ve been considering one possibility: I’d suggest having Marcius and his armed men enter rather earlier than is indicated by Agrippa’s “Hail, noble Marcius!” and the stage direction which was probably inserted because of this remark. The plebeians would then see the armed men looming up behind the speaker, and it would be perfectly reasonable for them to show signs of indecision. Agrippa’s sudden aggressiveness would also be explained by his own sight of Marcius and the armed men.
W. But you’ve gone and armed the plebeians better than ever before in theatrical history, and here they are retreating before Marcius’ legionaries.…
B. The legionaries are better armed still. Anyway they don’t retreat. We can strengthen Shakespeare’s text here still further. Their few moments’ hesitation during the final arguments of the speech is now due to the changed situation arising from the appearance of armed men behind the speaker. And in these few moments we observe that Agrippa’s ideology is based on force, on armed force, wielded by Romans.
W. But now there’s unrest, and for them to unite there must be something more: war must break out.
R. Marcius can’t let fly as he’d like to either. He turns up with armed men, but his hands are tied by the senate’s “clemency.” They have just granted the mob senatorial representation in the form of the tribunes. It was a marvellous stroke of Shakespeare’s to make it Marcius who announces the setting-up of the tribunate. How do the plebeians react to that? What is their attit
ude to their success?
W. Can we amend Shakespeare?
B. I think we can amend Shakespeare if we can amend him. But we agreed to begin only by discussing changes of interpretation so as to prove the usefulness of our analytical method even without adding new text.
W. Could the first citizen be Sicinius, the man the senate has just appointed tribune? He would then have been at the head of the revolt, and would hear of his appointment from Marcius’ mouth.
B. That’s a major intervention.
W. There wouldn’t have to be any change in the text.
B. All the same. A character has a kind of specific weight in the story. Altering it might mean stimulating interest that would be impossible to satisfy later, and so on.
R. The advantage would be that it would allow a playable connection to be established between the revolt and the granting of the tribunate. And the plebeians could congratulate their tribune and themselves.
B. But there must be no playing down of the contribution which the Volscian attack makes to the establishment of the tribunate; it’s the main reason. Now you must start building and take everything into account.
W. The plebeians ought to share Agrippa’s astonishment at this concession.
B. I don’t want to come to any firm decision. And I’m not sure that that can be acted by pure miming, without any text. Again, if our group of plebeians includes a specific character, it wouldn’t any longer be taken to stand for half of plebeian Rome, i.e., as a part standing for the whole. But I note your astonishment and inquisitiveness as you move around within this play and within these complex events on a particular morning in Rome, where there is much that a sharp eye can pick out. And certainly if you can find clues to these events, then all power to the audience!
W. One can try.
B. Most certainly.
R. And we ought to go through the whole play before deciding anything. You look a bit doubtful, B.
B. Look the other way.—How do they take the news that war has broken out?
W. Marcius welcomes it, like Hindenburg did, as a bath of steel.
Berliner Ensemble Adaptations Page 42