by Emma Smith
Perhaps. If that’s the case, it would suggest that a primary way to answer the question about Coriolanus’ forgetfulness is by reference to something in his character. It serves as a sign of something interior, something characterological. What William Hazlitt called Shakespeare’s ‘supererogation’ – his sheer abundant unnecessariness, the excessiveness of all that verbal, poetic and circumstantial complexity and detail – might be usefully adduced here. The forgetting is supererogatory, and thereby a snippet of insight – one of the ways that Shakespeare gestures towards a larger and more mysterious inner life in his protagonists. These hints suggest that there is more to characters than is strictly needed by the plot and this creates the illusion of a rounded history for them even when they are out of sight. But actually Coriolanus’ forgetfulness doesn’t work in this way: it’s already absolutely clear that he despises the poor, so we don’t need another, more subtle way to reveal that, underneath, he also despises the poor.
In his great primer on forgetfulness, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud tells us that even the most apparently trivial of forgettings has a motive. Analysing his own inability to remember a name, Freud concludes that: ‘besides the simple forgetting of proper names there is another forgetting which is motivated by repression.’ What might be being repressed in the context of Coriolanus? ‘Coriolanus’ was a byword for a traitor in the early modern period: the most famous thing everybody knew about him was that he turned sides against his own people. Perhaps, then, in some way, it’s himself and his own future treachery that Coriolanus is forgetting, when he can’t remember the Volsci who collaborated with the enemy.
If, then, we are to understand that Coriolanus forgets the name for some deeper reason, perhaps we should read it as giving an insight into the trauma of battle. Coriolanus’ mind flickers; he calls for wine: maybe this is a momentary glimpse of some humanity, barricaded within his robotic military self-presentation. If so, it’s a vital moment in a play usually so thrifty with such insight into Coriolanus’ psyche. Again and again the play attempts to get to know Coriolanus, and is rebuffed. Just as Coriolanus himself is not very likeable, so the critical consensus has not found the play very likeable either, as if a protagonist who treats us with contempt makes for a play that also somehow rejects us. As in other tragedies of this later period, there are only a few lines of soliloquy, those privileged moments that in earlier plays offered access into feelings the protagonist could not or would not share with the play’s other characters. Coriolanus’ nearest approach to the soliloquy is condensed and splintered into the acerbically public aside. Just as Coriolanus will not plead for the good opinion of the plebeians, so he won’t give his audience a soliloquy. He won’t work for the citizens’ votes; he won’t work for the audience’s good opinion either.
This refusal throws down the gauntlet. When he is not on stage – and sometimes when he is – the main business of the scene tends to be mulling over interpretations of Coriolanus’ character. Even the opening scene is an example: that ‘company of mutinous Citizens’ is immediately diverted from discussion of their insurrection into an analysis of the play’s central character – or ‘chief enemy to the people’ (1.1.7–8). The citizens argue over his conduct: he is both ‘a very dog to the commonalty’ (1.1.27), and also one who has done ‘services’ for his country (28). Opinions vary: ‘though soft-conscienced men can be content to say “it was for his country”, “he did it to please his mother, and to be partly proud”’ (35–7). He is described as not ‘covetous’, but full of ‘faults, with surplus’ (43). ‘What he cannot help in his nature you account a vice in him’ (39–40). That the revolt over grain prices quickly becomes a debate about the character of the play’s eponymous figure sets the tone for the tragedy. In Coriolanus, political events can seem merely the proxy for the anatomizing of the central character: this is a play in which inner conflict is compulsively externalized, and in which, from the very outset, the nature of Coriolanus himself remains a source and symptom of dissent. No one can get a handle on him.
There’s a long scene in Act 4 when he arrives in disguise at the stronghold of his old enemy Aufidius. It turns on how difficult it is to describe him. Coriolanus’ interlocutors find it increasingly hard to relay his ‘singularity’: ‘He had, sir, a kind of face, methought – I cannot tell how to term it’ (4.5.157–8); ‘I thought there was more in him than I could think’ (160–61). Time and again characters struggle for appropriate words. Cominius finds him ‘a kind of nothing, titleless’ (5.1.13), and that dehumanized word ‘thing’ is often used of Coriolanus: ‘a thing of blood’ (2.2.109); a ‘noble thing’ (4.5.117); ‘He leads them like a thing / Made by some other deity than nature’ (4.6.95–6); ‘He sits in his state as a thing made for Alexander’ (5.4.21–2). Coriolanus even uses the word of himself, to express his greater affinity with his enemy Aufidius than with the people of Rome: ‘were I anything but what I am,/I would wish me only he’ (1.1.231–2). Perhaps this repeated use registers Coriolanus’ inhumanity, as a thing, rather than a man – as echoed in G. Wilson Knight’s description of him as ‘a blind mechanic, metallic thing of pride’.
This inhuman rigidity might suggest a traumatized Coriolanus, a man who has made himself a fighting machine at great personal cost, by the evacuation of his personality or selfhood. The vignette of his forgetting the name of the man who helped him in the terrible, unspoken and unspeakable scenes inside the sacked Coriole, then, gives us a more interior, a more accessible, a more broken hero. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in terms that are strikingly similar to many character analyses of Coriolanus: a sense of numbness and emotional blunting, detachment from other people, unresponsiveness to surroundings, anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure) and the avoidance of activities and situations reminiscent of the trauma. The forgetting anecdote speaks, then, of Coriolanus’ unwillingness to return to the traumatic scene of Coriole.
Now, if Coriolanus were a real soldier, I’d be entirely sympathetic to this line of argument. But dramatic characters – that bundle of marks on a page or gestures on a stage – require different interpretative procedures, and ones that can acknowledge the artistry, the constructedness, and also the historical distance, of the play and its characters. For instance, the idea that identity is located within the interior private individual is a view of human character that twentieth-century psychology has completely normalized – but early modern understandings of motive and action were somewhat different: more situational, more conscious of the social context of individual formation. Coriolanus is a play that challenges forms of character-criticism because of its opaque, unlikeable, uncommunicative central character. But perhaps we can take up the challenge by thinking about identity verbally – that is, as denominated, as declared through naming; a matter of words rather than essences.
Forgetting the name becomes somehow overdetermined in Coriolanus because of the context of naming in the play. The main purpose of the first act is to unite Coriolanus with the name he is waiting to occupy: the man formerly known as ‘Caius Martius’ gets it as an honorific, in recognition of his bravery. Although other of Shakespeare’s heroes also undergo status or name changes during the course of their plays – it’s quite a common idea in history plays, for instance – none adopts that new name as the name of the play. And how the play – both its characters and its apparatus of stage directions and speech prefixes – name this character is worth examining.
The play clearly takes its name from that honorific. After Coriole, the grateful soldiers ‘all cry “Martius, Martius!”’ (1.10.40), and the general Cominius declares him ‘Coriolanus’ (1.10.64). The Folio text – the only early edition, printed in 1623 as part of the collected dramatic works – however, continues to label the reluctant hero ‘Martius’ in speech prefixes throughout the remainder of the scene. It is not until his triumphant entry as Coriolanus, ‘crowne
d with an oaken garland’ (2.1.158) in Act 2 scene 1, that the play’s apparatus gives us the eponymous tragic character ‘Coriol.’ Coriolanus’ tragic agnomen, and with it his identification as the play’s tragic figure, is thus belated. But intriguingly, the new designation is further bungled by the text of the play. In the Folio text, Cominius names his general ‘Marcus Caius Coriolanus’, a formula repeated by ‘Omnes’. From Nicholas Rowe in the early eighteenth century onwards, editors have corrected Cominius’ declaration to the more usual ‘Caius Martius’, but the Folio’s mistake seems somehow relevant to the larger questions of the play. If we look back at the source in Plutarch, there Coriolanus’ new name prompts a digression, with numerous examples, to explain how Roman names work: ‘the first name the Romaines have, as Caius: was our Christian name now. The second, as Martius: was the name of the house and family they came of. The third, was some addition given, either for some act or notable service, or for some mark on their face, or of some shape of their body, or else for some special virtue they had.’
Given this explanation, it is odd, but somehow brilliantly appropriate, to see the Folio commit a double mistake – both inverting the order of the names and changing ‘Martius’ into ‘Marcus’. The effect of these muddles mean that the printed Folio text of the play inadvertently ‘forgets’ Coriolanus’ name even in the act of bestowing it. This is a scene all about forgetting. Maybe there would be a way to extend Freud’s analysis of forgetting names to treat the text itself, rather than its central character, as the patient. Maybe trauma or repression or PTSD might for some reason be the condition of the play itself, rather than a private property of its hero. The accidental or trivial printing error of Coriolanus’ name is amplified into something more meaningful because it is followed within a couple of moments by that dramatic amnesia over the poor man of Coriole. Both the printed playtext, and the dramatic dialogue, that’s to say, here underline the importance, and the fugitive nature, of naming.
North’s detailed description of the way Roman names are allocated offers a map for different models of personal identity: the second name identifies the individual as a product of their family, while the third can be given either for deeds or for some particular intrinsic quality. These associations indicate some of the many ways in which Coriolanus refuses to sanction the desire for individual autonomy. The scene of Virgilia and Volumnia’s embassy to the exiled Coriolanus in Antium is a good example, in which Coriolanus’ vain wish that ‘man were author of himself’ (5.3.36) is sabotaged. It’s easy to argue that this is a late, washed-up tragedy, in which Coriolanus himself resists the role of tragic hero – but another argument might also be made that this play anticipates the late romances on which Shakespeare is just about to begin. In these late plays, broken or alienated men, like Pericles, or Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, are healed by reunion with female family members – the restored wife, the lovely daughter. Coriolanus’ family is differently constituted, but the structural suggestion is the same. We think the female embassy to Antium will bring him back, make him whole, reintegrate him. In fact the success of their persuasions rather makes it inevitable that he will die. Unlike his romance successors, Coriolanus will not get a new lease of resurrected life: in this play, family is a sign of weakness – rather than, as the last plays of Shakespeare’s career will recuperate, a sign of strength.
That desire ‘to please his mother’, which the citizens adduced as the motivation for his military success in the play’s opening moments, returns here as the site of Coriolanus’ greatest vulnerability. When Volumnia prevails with him not to sack Rome, he acknowledges that the peace is ‘most mortal to him’ (5.3.190): ‘O mother, mother! / What have you done?’ (5.3.183–4). She taunts him with naming: ‘To his surname “Coriolanus” ‘longs more pride / Than pity to our prayers’ (171–2). What Coriolanus is called becomes increasingly fractious in his final interview with Aufidius, when the names ‘Martius’ – ‘Dost thou think / I’ll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol’n name, / “Coriolanus”, in Corioles?’ (5.6.90–92) – and ‘boy’ anticipate the diminution and disrespect that will end in Coriolanus’ death. Shakespeare’s tragedies are titled to underline the importance of the single name – as if the tragic form is somehow an exploration of what it means to be named. Many tragic heroes talk about themselves in the third person, and disputes over what a name means or the right to occupy it are often the visible sign of psychological breakdown. Here in Coriolanus, the proper name as a symbol of personal autonomy and individuality is held up for particular scrutiny – and the permanent forgetting of an offstage character’s name gestures to that important ontological investigation.
One last point – about theatre. Some critics identify Coriolanus’ particular class politics as participating in an experiment writing for a more elite audience, in the company’s new indoor theatre of Blackfriars. In contrast to the open-air amphitheatre of the Globe, Blackfriars was a boutique indoor theatre, with higher ticket prices, more intimate seating and baroque stage effects made newly possible by candlelight. This new theatrical environment may have made itself felt in the reluctant dramaturgy of this prickly play. Coriolanus himself characterizes his reluctance to seek the people’s voices in the language of meta-theatre. The personal political display demanded by the citizens is repeatedly understood by the costive military hero as a piece of bad drama: ‘It is a part / That I shall blush in acting’ (2.2.145–6). Right at the end of the play, Coriolanus again acknowledges himself as a player: ‘Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part’ (5.3.40–41). Coriolanus does not want to be an actor and display himself before a hungrily consuming audience. This is, of course, a problem for a character in a play, and a particular problem for a character in a play in a new theatre with high ticket prices and seats close to the stage promising a good view. Audiences tend not to like performers who show their disdain for them. There’s something suicidal about Coriolanus – not just as a military hero without any self-preservation instincts, or as an alienated Roman banished from his country and turning to his enemies, but also as a performer. The theatre audience is included in his contempt. Discussions of Shakespearean tragedy and character tend to be drawn to Hamlet, who holds out his shiny interiority to us like dramatic clickbait (Look! ‘I have that within that passeth show’!). By contrast, Coriolanus is preoccupied with problematizing the very issue of character itself. Shakespeare’s final tragedy performs that inscrutability which Hamlet aspires to, but has to forgo because he talks about it so much. At every point in Coriolanus where dramatic identity might be secured – through family, through social position, through soliloquy, through naming, through contrast with the other, through consistent action, through self-knowledge – the play instead subjects the notion of character itself to sustained, ironic analysis.
In parallel with the verbal dissection of his character with which the play began, Coriolanus is attacked physically by a mob at its conclusion. The Volscian people turn on him: ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!’ (5.6.130). The penultimate stage direction in the first printed edition reads: ‘Draw both the Conspirators, and kills Martius, who falls, Aufidius stands on him’. Coriolanus is stripped of his honorific name, his dignity and his life: it’s a sardonic and cheerless conclusion.
CHAPTER 19
The Winter’s Tale
The most famous line in The Winter’s Tale is actually a stage direction: ‘Exit pursued by a bear’ (3.3.57). Shakespeare’s not big on stage directions in general, perhaps because his printed texts often have their origins in versions of the script that didn’t require them, and also because printed drama at this time hadn’t yet established what readers might find useful to visualize the action. Some editors don’t think that Shakespeare wrote his own stage directions and, in any case, most modern editions are uninhibited about adding more, sometimes tendentiously (there was a good example of editorial stage directions in the chapter on The Taming of the Shrew). Some original stage directions from the first prin
ted texts of Shakespeare are wonderful: ‘Enter Ariel, invisible’ from The Tempest (2.1.189) is one of my favourites, as is one discussed in the chapter on 1 Henry IV: ‘Falstaff riseth up’. Many iconic stage moments, like the Dover Cliff sequence in King Lear, or the bloodied murderers’ hands in Macbeth, or Desdemona dropping the fateful handkerchief, are implied by the dialogue rather than fixed in a stage direction. No stage direction, however, has captured the popular imagination in the way of this one from The Winter’s Tale.
Partly, of course, it’s that bear. Critics have been tantalized at the possibility of a real bear on stage. There were indeed numerous practical and commercial parallels in the period between theatre and bear-baiting – the sport of setting dogs onto a chained bear. Both could be enjoyed in the rowdy entertainment district of Southwark, within the same kind of amphitheatre arena (one early illustration of the south bank of the Thames, by the engraver Wenceslaus Holler, accidentally reversed the labels of the Globe and the Bear Garden, because they were so similar in design). In both venues, paying audiences wanted to see blood shed: Shakespeare’s violent tragedies may have been popular more because they were the plays most proximate to the pleasures of blood sports than because they were philosophically elevated and meaningful. There would, then, have been semi-trained bears around who could have been pressed into this walk-on – or rather walk-off – part in The Winter’s Tale. We know too that white bears were the high fashion accessories of the season after James I was presented with two polar bear cubs from a seal-hunting expedition to Svalbard, and white bears appeared in contemporaneous court entertainments and in Mucedorus, a crowd-pleasing romance in the King’s Men repertory. A real bear is not, then, entirely out of the question. Except – would you let a bear loose in a crowded theatre? Would a bear take directorial instruction? Perhaps it might be safer to create a similar effect with an extra, wearing a bearskin and roaring?