Color me quite nervous, after watching the trailer of the forthcoming film version of Coriolanus linked to here. It seems to be the tired old shtick where you adapt Shakespeare’s Romans or Danes or Scots by dressing them up in modern military uniforms, which tends to convey the idea that the characters are basically fascists. The temptations to be like a Macbeth or a Hotspur or a Henry V, all apparently translate, in our age, into the single temptation to be the war-mongering authoritarian personality.
This approach assumes we cannot learn from ancient or mediaeval dramas the way educated audiences of the 1600s and 1800s did, taking the particularity of the time straight, and as a key thematic element of the play. And it cannot but suggest that there’s little important about the old Roman or Danish way of life itself. For example, it looks as if here they’ve put the play’s paragon of Roman motherhood and patrician respectability, Volumnia, into military uniform, so as to underline her already obvious enough martial character. Well, what sort of aging mother goes around in (beret-topped!) contemporary military uniform? That’s right, only a fascist freak would do so! Or is this Volumnia actually a general, so as to really make things up-to-date, even if it would also require major reworking of the dialogue and her entire character? Either way, it looks like we will have little to learn from her.
How I hope I am wrong about this, misled by a two-minute trailer, but more bad signs are present in the studio’s promotional blurb: “Coriolanus is a drama for the ages, a commentary on the precarious draw of war…”
Look, if you cannot feel an attraction to primitive Rome, to courage, to Coriolanus’ excellence, you cannot begin to understand what they call “the draw of war” means for Shakespeare in this play. It means being drawn to heroism and duty. War itself is simply assumed. As is its horrible cost. As are its opportunities for glory. Coriolanus does not really “make” wars, he simply fights in ones already underway, as Roman life without war is nearly unthinkable. Making (i.e., choosing) wars is what politicians do, such as the warrior-statesman Henry V. Coriolanus is thus not focused upon weighing the value of war (which K. Branagh was right to detect in Henry V), but rather is zeroed in upon the tragedy of the polis. Yes, part of that is how tragic it is that the polis’ own degenerating dynamics might need war, and part of that is that even the war-oriented polis cannot truly honor its noblest warriors.
The play is thus also one of the coldest baths a small-d democrat can take. For that reason it has been a classroom staple for me as a political science professor…I’ll be using it this semester to show American politics students the sort of thing the founders were trying to avoid, and I often use it with political philosophy students as a foil to Aristotle’s defense of the democratic element in a polity. Aristotle partially defends (Politics III) the “more heads are better than one” argument(and only for the sake of the watered down democracy of the mixed regime or polity); whereas Shakespeare’s Coriolanus consistently presents “many heads” as monstrously foolish/inconstant, and its most politically convincing speech is Coriolanus’ denunciation of the slightest attempts to “balance” aristocratic rule with democratic say(…if you give an inch…).
And so as you can see, which I have reason to fear you will not see in the film, the message of Coriolanus tends to be conservative: republican politics is beset from the get-go by tragic flaws, and the only programmatic political lessons one might take (which includes the lesson that conditions will seldom let you succeed at applying them) are aristocratic-republican ones. Placing one’s hope in strong democracy or “democratic values” is to build upon sand—even if one came to the conclusion that the plebian interests were the ones that had to be defended come what may, one would learn from the play that unscrupulous means (logically pointing to Caesar-dom) were absolutely necessary to keep the plebs organized in defense of these interests.
Me, I’m more Aristotelian/Thomistic at the end of the day than I am Shakespearean on politics. But great shame upon Ralph Fiennes and company if they’re warming up Shakespeare’s icy cold bath of political tragedy to a temperature comfortable for today’s liberals.
And great glory if they manage to slip the real deal into the theaters!
September 1st, 2011 | 9:19 pm
Wait. Do you really think that Coriolanus is not an “authoritarian personality?” Who is then?
The problem that spurs the drama of Shakespeare’s play is the constitutional conflict between the citizens, who have recently acquired their citizenship through tribunal representation, and an older, authoritarian order — i.e., Coriolanus — whose martial ethos cannot adapt to the new political situation.
Remember that the tribunes were created because the plebs demanded that they have political representation in exchange for dying in the wars. The ending of the play is the vindication of piety toward the whole city against the dominance of the one overbearingly magnanimous — and so at least quasi-tyrannical — warrior.
September 2nd, 2011 | 6:04 am
I fear that after your review of the 2 minute trailer we might be left with less desire to see the movie than had we not read your icy cold post.
September 2nd, 2011 | 9:40 am
Shakespeare would have been adapted to it’s audience by dressing them up in contemporary costumes. Why pray tell does Hamlet, a Viking prince, have puffed sleeves which any Viking would have found incredibly impractical on a voyage?
Attempts at period accuracy are were first introduced by historical novels from the Romantic era, notably Scot who wasn’t perfect in his knowledge but made an attempt.
September 2nd, 2011 | 2:25 pm
Mark, I’ll certainly be seeing it.
jason, I admit the issue with adaptation is trickier than my post suggests. Let me just say that precisely because the societal settings in Shakespeare (say, mercantile Venice, mid-medieval “rotten” Denmark, Rome whether early republican or decadent imperial) are such major aspects of the reflection we are being drawn into, their most basic features should be retained by any adaptation that is not seeking to make a major statement by way of its adaptation.
So, to take one example, adding in GUNS is a huge problem, and much more problematic than Renaissance poofy-sleeved costume evocations of the Middle Ages. Guns change mankind’s relation to the heroic. The martial hero, such as Coriolanus, is simply worth far less b/c he’s far easier to take out. His virtue is eclipsed by technological advances. Don’t believe me? Well, its right there in Henry VI, Pt. 1(I, iv–the scene is powerfully worked into one of Kurosawa’s films).
So, those uniforms and guns do make me nervous, but we’ll see how they work. Their track record in previous adaptations has usually been to distract, and to over-interpret.
Ethan, I guess in the common usage of the term, it’s obvious that Coriolanus is authoritarian. But I object to that common usage because I know it derives from a specific concept, developed by Adorno and others and called the authoritarian personality. One could write a book
(http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Ethnocentrism-Personality-Science-Critical/dp/0226257037/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314986568&sr=1-12) about the flaws of this concept, but my initial comments show you that I think it is crude. It lumps together persons whose political, cultural, moral, and psychological profiles are as different as Coriolanus, Hitler, and Reagan. From the beginning, the concept had a tendentious you’re a fascist! Marxisant slant.
Both to think well politically ourselves, and to understand how Shakespeare thought politically, we have to become able again to distinguish different sorts of “authoritarianism” and non-liberalism. In Coriolanus for example, Coriolanus’ political stance is “authoritarian” in wanting to put authority more solidly in the hands of the SENATE. Now what kind of authoritarianism is that? Unlike Volumnia, who seems to envision him establishing a faction-backed tyranny after having become consul, Coriolanus is really and truly a republican.
Can his political stance work? Shakespeare seems to be saying that above and beyond Coriolanus’ own flaws, it cannot. It falters early on in the republic, given the evil nature of mankind that gets magnified by mobs, and in the non-reflective pursuit of greatness that can produce hubristic/un-politic “personalities” in great men like Coriolanus. But Shakespeare feels, and makes us to feel, serious respect for that stance. And that respect is impossible for us to feel if we are led to see Coriolanus as essentially fascist, essentially a mental-case.
Formerly, all the world was mad!
September 2nd, 2011 | 8:49 pm
There’s no doubt that we’re meant to admire Coriolanus (incidentally, based on the trailer I don’t see any reason to think that Fiennes’ Coriolanus isn’t admirable). But it’s entirely possible that a Coriolanus in modern garb inevitably reminds us of fascism because, in fact, the closest thing we have in the modern world to a Coriolanus type character is a fascist. And indeed, the behavior of the early heroes of the republic would not implausibly be described as psychotic from our point of view. But that’s just because the early republic was a comparably barbaric society, in which life was defined, as you said in your first post, by violence.
Just for this reason, it’s a bit misleading to describe Coriolanus as a “republican,” if that’s meant to imply some deep continuum from men like Martius to Thomas Jefferson. It’s probably more accurate to say that the play’s tragic conflict is produced by the transition from a warlike oligarchy / aristocracy to a republic.
Remember that it’s not a priori obvious that the citizens’ (and it’s important that they are identified as citizens) demands are unreasonable. Both the citizens and Coriolanus wind up in excess.
September 4th, 2011 | 4:27 pm
Ethan, let me do this in Greek/Aristotelian terms first. By those terms, he’s against monarchy, tyranny, and pure democracy.
He’s for aristocracy, but at least in Plutarch’s telling (Shakespeare actually downplays this), it looks as if he’s not as worried as he should be about the rule of the Roman Senate, i.e., the rule of the council made up of outstanding members of the patrician class, sliding towards favoring the wealth-interests (especially the lending-interests) of that class, that is, of sliding towards oligarchy, which is rule by a class that values money-making over virtue-practicing.
Prior to the creation of the tribunate, which happens at the beginning of the play, the plebians were already had some say in the laws/government through an assembly, I forget if it’s the one called the comitia tributa, and we see they already had the privilege of confirming or not the Senate’s nomine consul. So, we might well say the Roman regime at the time of the play is a polity or a mixed regime, which becomes more so with the tribunate. Coriolanus is the strongest voice for keeping the mix as purely aristocratic as possible. Whether we should call him an aristocrat simply, or an an “aristocratic leaning” polity-supporter, is debatable if we use Aristotelian terminology.
But he would not be politically for the aristocracy seen in the national monarchies of Europe’s various Old Regimes; baroque refinements would be abhorrent to him, massive nations confusing to him, and there’s no way you could get him to beg for the privilege of holding Louis XIV’s coat.
So his aristocratic-ness is the ancient kind, the kind that in a consultative way governs and serves a small city-state, with war being an unavoidable aspect of that service. I’m calling him republican in that sense: against monarchy/tyranny, for consultative government, against pure democracy. Nor does he have a “money-man’s” bone in his body. He’s for the best men, the most virtuous, honest, wise, and valiant, being the men chosen by the second-best men to lead.
Now the word “republic” is more or less a word coined by the Romans to describe their way of government ever since they got rid of their kings, up until the rule of the Caesars. In the Roman sense, so long as we are certain that Coriolanus never would have tried to overthrow the Senate or make it a rubber-stamp chamber, he’s a republican. Period. Language did not begin in 1776 or 1789.
I’m not invested in saying Coriolanus is a republican like Madison or Jefferson or Lafayette, although even with the massive differences between modern and ancient liberty taken to into account, to some degree his republicanism has to be like theirs– only that degree of likeness made it plausible for men like Madison to alter the meaning of the word. Rather, I just want to insist upon still using the older classical sense of what’s republican where it’s appropriate. So you’re absolutely right to reject a complete continuum.
But there remain certain ties we modern republicans have with the classical ones, and those occur at a very deep level of our culture and souls. Which is why Coriolanus matters to me–we have things to learn from it, and don’t be militaristic/fascistic isn’t one of them.
BTW, the modern difficulties with the term “republic” are probably best discussed in Jim Ceaser’s Liberal Democracy and Political Science.
January 31st, 2012 | 6:12 pm
[...] here are my somewhat pessimistic expectations for it that I aired some time ago. But do go see it, and [...]
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