Just a little bit before we get going. These are lectures on Shakespeare. They're called Approaching Shakespeare. If everybody's in the right place and their aim is to give you a sense of some Shakespeare plays you might not already know, but also a sense of kind of methodology, how you might try and turn these plays around in your mind as you come to work towards a portfolio. One important thing about the lectures is that they're all recorded. The reason I choose you.
Where there are already twenty one lectures on other plays. I'm going to be talking about this term. So if you have a very distinctive cough that you want to copyright. Come on street to me about it. Because you hear it. You'll hear on the recording more seriously. The only disadvantage to you, I think, is that one thing I've learnt from doing these lectures in the past is never to refer to a handout in the in the lecture itself because people just email and say,
where is that hand out? And I've absolutely no idea. So you've got to hand out. Nobody else who listens to it will get one. You just have to try to keep up. And if the handout isn't very clear, try to email me in the week and also if I can do a better job of it next time. In addition to that, we won't have questions after the lecture. I think that's quite a relief anyway. It seems one of the most excruciating. Oxlade, Jonás the post lecture questions.
But that doesn't mean I'm not interested in your questions. And again, email me and my email address by mistake on the one hand outbids. Oh, it's what you would expect an adult Smith of Hartford. OK. So I'm going to do really so stilted Segway. That's all not going on. That's on tape. And then we're gonna stop. Kids are going to feel happy with where we are. Does everybody have a handout? OK, so this is the first lecture in the latest series in this in the series called Approaching Shakespeare.
The format of these lectures is very straightforward. I tried to get under the skin of the play by asking a single question about it and try and think how the critical work that's been done on the play might cohere around a single question. The main aim that is to get you to think about the sorts of resources we might use to think about Shakespeare's plays, the kind of methodologies or or frameworks we might bring to bear on them and how to ask questions about them.
And I think that be asking questions is really crucial to me. Not so much the answering. I'm going to try and give it an outline of the play each time. So if you don't know what the play is about, you won't be completely lost. To start with and because of the plays I've already recorded in this series, I've got a slightly strange grab bag of plays left at this point. There isn't there isn't a narrative which joins all these plays together there.
Individual lectures and faceplate is Coriolanus. So Coriolanus is a late tragedy, probably written around 16, seven to eight, 16, seven to eight. That makes it closest in time to Antony and Cleopatra and then to the late play, the so-called late plays. Apparently, he's moving into Winter's Tale of The Tempest in symbolisms. I'm going to say more about that context a little bit later. How might that contacts be illuminating?
Coriolanus may have been written with a particular eye to the possibilities of performance at the indoor theatre. Blackfriars The Kingsmen had just occupied that from 16 acres. It could be one of the first plays that's got an eye to Blackfriars performance. Not a little more about that, too, and why that might be interesting to think with rather than just the fact to know. So the story of the play. Actually, I always find this bit the most difficult.
Actually, the summary for this is this is my go. This. This is the story of a general from Rome's ruling patrician class, Coriolanus. He turns reluctantly to politics after a successful military career under the tutelage of his powerful mother. The Lemonier. But Coriolanus is too proud, too angry to something. We'll talk more about that to make himself agreeable to the people whose support he needs for his candidacy.
The conflict with the people escalates, and it ends up with Coriolanus being banished from Rome. He decides to go to the camp of his arch enemy or Phidias and to lead off radiuses armies against Rome and turns to join his enemies against Rome. He's persuaded to be merciful to Rome by an embassy of his mother, Volumnia, and his wife, Virginia. But this means that he's lost the trust of Orpheus videos his army. They turn on him and kill him.
So the question I want to focus my lecture around may seem, and I think they often do seem so trivial or minor as to be a kind of a joke. It's not it's not a joke. There will be some jokes in intellectuals, but not this one. I will try and convince you that this is a question which opens up some big issues. So this is the question.
Much of the first act of Coriolanus is about a major battle offensive, one by the Romans under Coriolanus against the VOLSKY or Phidias, its troops, the Volsky SBL Alesi by. As the Roman victory under Coriolanus, his leadership is announced. The council Comenius tells the young soldier who can have anything he wants as a reward. This is what Coriolanus says. I time lay here in correal at a poor man's house. He used me kindly. He cried to me. I saw him prisoner.
I request you. Coriolanus continues to give my poor host freedom. Of course, as Comenius in a phrase that uncomfortably predicts later events. Were he the butcher of my son? He should be as free as the wind. Who is this man? What's his name? By Jupiter. Forgot, said Coriolanus. I am weary. Yay! My memory is tired. Have we no wine here? So it's a tie leaving yet.
Corinda says the thing I want most is for the volsky in person who helped me when I was fighting against the city of correal to be to be freed, to be freed from the prisoner of war. Comenius as fine will free him. What's his name? Caroline says, I don't know. So why does he do that? Why does Coriolanus forget the name of his comrade? So we could begin to answer this, I guess, by acknowledging that the real agency we should be talking about here is not that of Coriolanus, but of Shakespeare.
We all know, of course, that authorial intention is following winds up in Beardsley's famous formulation, a fallacy asking what the author intended is one of the most visibly unsophisticated manoeuvres of literary interpretation. But on the other hand, the question of intention is one that wasn't quite go away. If you're drawn to that kind of and if you're drawn to that as an interpretive model, if you're drawn to intentionality, even as you know you shouldn't.
One way to do it and to kind of gussy up in more academic ways is to look at Shakespeare's sources. So as you already know, Shakespeare's plays are all pretty much got quite direct sources. There are some things that critics adduce that Shakespeare knows about, that if somehow just got into his mind and got transformed and come back out. But there are an awful lot of books that he had open on the table while he was writing.
Don't try this at home so you can look at politics, intense chronicles and construct how Shakespeare flipped through the pages of the actual book to mash up events from different parts of the historical periods that he's using for his history plays, for instance. Or we can look, as we will do next week at Arthur Brooks poem Romeo and Juliet to see how Shakespeare works. Kind of on the fly, cutting, shaping, reworking with the with the original source on the table in front of him.
So if you want a glimpse of Shakespeare at work, this is clearly the place to go. The Bible for this is still Geoffrey Bullock's narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, a big multi volume work organised by play that prints the sources look so good on the bit so that Shakespeare left out. He doesn't think that's something that you leave out as a source. Whereas actually, it's quite interesting. Negative source to think, for example, at the beginning of the source for King Lear.
There's a big bit about Lear's wife, which clearly Shakespeare has just left out. So we could say that hasn't played any part in cheques based play. But if that's played quite a big part, hasn't it negatively by being read by Shakespeare and left out. The books not so bad on the bits that Shakespeare left out.
So one one trick with how to use these resources is if if a source looks interesting to you, try to find the complete version rather than just the bits that Bullock has edited in that in a compendium. So Shakespeare's sold his Roman plays for Julius Caesar, for Antony and Cleopatra and for Coriolanus, not for Titus Andronicus, which he seems to have made up entirely in a kind of Roman pastiche, which has no source.
But for Julius Caesar, I think Cleopatra and Carolinas sources the translation of Thomas N Don't the sorry, the translation by Thomas north of Plutarch's Lives of the Nopal, Grecians and Romans. It was published in English in fifteen seventy nine. The publisher of the English edition, Richard Field, is a contemporary of Shakespeare, also from Stratford. It seems very likely that they knew each other. Shakespeare must have owned this book or otherwise had close access to it.
We don't really understand how Shakespeare's reading can't work, but he must have had close access to the book over a period of years, since he uses it intensively from fifteen ninety nine, the period of Julius Caesar right through for the next seven or eight years. So to ask why Correlates forgets the name of the person who helped him. We could go to n Plutarch and sure enough in that text correlated. Also asks for a pardon of a man who helped him in correal.
The text doesn't give us the man's name. He's just an old friend and host of mine, an honest, wealthy man. So an old friend and host of mine, an honest, wealthy man. But there's no suggestion that Coraline's has forgotten what his name is. There just isn't a name given as in the tax. But we don't go on to get a little kind of pointless in a way exchange. What's it called? I've forgotten. So the exchange about in Shakespeare's play about the name of this person has as its sole purpose,
establishing that Coriolanus has forgotten it intentionally. Junkies get their fix. Coriolanus, forgetting the name of his helper, is distinctively chosen by Shakespeare. At this point in the play, it isn't just mimicking or carrying forward part of the source. It's a good, argumentative basis for saying that something is important in Shakespeare.
If you can point to a way in which it is obviously purposefully different from how it was in the books that he was reading, I guess I'm trying to say that this forgetting might be somehow more widely significant for our interpretation of the play and therefore not Plutarch is useful. But if we stay for a minute with Plutarch, you can perhaps see another interesting shift that Shakespeare has made to the story he finds in his source.
Coriolanus, in the in Shakespeare's play explicitly states that the man who helped him in correal was poor. I sometimes lay there in correal, out of poor man's hearts, Plutarch tells us equally, explicitly. The man was an honest, wealthy man. Often Shakespeare changed his words because because of how they'll scam and clearly wealthy wouldn't have scammed here.
But Rich would have been another monosyllabic word that he could have used something distinctive in moving from a rich man to a poor man in this play, which he says deeply about class conflict. It's hard to see that shift that's being accidental. So let's talk a little bit about class in this play. And clearly, if you want to talk about Shakespeare's politics or Shakespeare's attitude to the lower classes, Coriolanus, I think it's probably one of the most important place in the canon.
The play begins with the stage direction into a company of mutinous citizens with staves, clubs and other weapons. It's a play which starts with a riot. These armed men have a simple aim rather to die than to finish. So they're hungry. They can't afford food. And they are marching on food stores maintained by the patrician's. Now, this food riot against high prices does have its origins in Plutarch, but there must have been a more immediate prompt for Shakespeare.
The 60 No.7 grain riots in his native Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, which were known collectively as the Midlands revolt. Basically, what's behind the Midlands revolt is a series of poor harvests and rising food prices, shortages particularly caused by the new enclosure movement that was taking up arable land for profitable sheep.
Pasture caused rural unrest, all the kind of pastoral things in Shakespeare which or in the literature of this period, which we think of as being kind of totally apolitical and away from all that into the kind of pastoral economy, the idea that you would bring a load of sheep into land which had been used for arable crops was deeply political.
The really interesting way of thinking about, say, as you like or something was happening in that looks like an apolitical play, but it's really sheep are kind of really big in that in the kind of politics in economic politics of the late 16th century. So we've got these kind of natural disasters or natural problems, poor harvests. And so we've also got a really important class dimension or social status dimension hoarding by wealthy people to write to to raise the price.
That's always, almost always the case about food shortages and not usually necessarily short in absolute terms or social that people can't live. But that's short in terms of supply and demand and the, um, pricing it maybe that Shakespeare shows the flows, knowledge of the complaints of the rural poor in an unfamiliar word, an unfamiliar word to him that he uses in Coriolanus.
The word depopulate, depopulate. It's a word which is also found in the petition of a group called the Diggers of Warwickshire. Around the same time, Shakespeare's own position in relation to these events, though, is a rather difficult one. And here we need to get a sense again how far biography is or is not an admissible part of literary criticism. Shakespeare had himself been fined for hoarding barley.
So he's one of the people who keeps up stalls in order to in order to inflate prices, holding onto excessive. Stoxx says to capitalise on and accelerate rising prices caused by shortages, Edward Bond's 1973 Play Bingo. The most negative depiction of Shakespeare, I think that was ever being kind of wonderfully so is only the most extreme representation of a Shakespeare more likely to be identified with patrician green hoarder's Coriolanus rather than with the hungry citizens.
The other people in the play now, where the sympathies of the play Coriolanus lie in its depiction of class conflict is really hard to pin down. It's rather like what we call even handedness when we think it's a good thing in political conflicts like much of the second Dorking, John, or evasiveness. If we don't think Even-handedness is a good thing.
Haven't done lectures on that, which you can listen to if you want to. Often the history of the play and performance has been the attempt to stabilise its ambiguous politics to make them legible in the politics of the present. To identify is Coriolanus someone we were supposed to sympathise with or not? Leftest re writings by Bertolt Brecht and by the author of Look Back in Anger. John Osborne had been accompanied by fascistic versions.
It's perhaps not surprising that this not the troublingly hybridise against the politics of Merchant of Venice was the favourite play of the Nazis. So is the fact that Coriolanus forgets the name of what's Newley in Shakespeare's play? A Poor Man significant in the light of his general distaste for the lower classes, his own uncompromising first speech sets the tone for his interaction with the people. What's the matter? You dissentions rogues that rubbing the poor each of your opinion?
Make yourselves scamps. There's a whole body politic metaphore which goes on very explicitly in Coriolanus. But this is the really kind of leprous version of that. It's not just that these people are some lesser part of the body, but they're a kind of scabby H-E really kind of disgusting cut. And Coriolanus encounters with the people doesn't get much better. He's forced to seek the people's voices, their votes and their affirmation for his political ambitions.
But he can't bring himself to do so. Accused by one of the citizens in two three. You have not indeed loved the common people. Corydon doesn't a tall argue with that and says you should account with a more virtuous that I have not been common in my love. So he never argues with the fact that he hates them and treats them like dirt baited by the tribunes who have class conflict as their ultimate political aim. Coriolanus reveals his true disdain for the people's role in the state.
I say again, in soothing them, we nourish gainst our Senate. Coquille of Rebellion insulin's sedition, which we ourselves have ploughed for soad and scattered by mingling them with us. The honoured no who lack not virtue. No, no power, but that which they have given to beggars. So Coriolanus belongs to the honoured. No, that's the phrase I'll pick from that speech. The honour. No. That's a kind of version of the of the elect, the group that are born to rule Rome.
This is a distinctly kind of class of birth consciousness. The people are the coquille of rebellion who fritter away the work and the gains made by the patrician's. So given current ennis's explicit resentment of the claims of the, as he sees it, idle poor. Why should we make of the fact that the correal man whose name he forgets has been changed from a wealthy man in the sauce to a poor man in the play?
Is this a further example of his fundamental dislike of those lower orders, a sense that he doesn't care enough to remember? Perhaps this is a mini dialogue, which is simply another sign of Coriolanus, its status, fundamentalism. Okay, that would mean that one way to answer the question, why does Coriolanus forget the name would be to say it's something to do with correlating his character. It's a sign of something inferior, something characterological, something about him and how he thinks.
Now, if we're going to go along this line, we'll talk in a bit about whether that's a good line to go along. But if we're gonna go along this line, it might be that we should actually try and use this method to interpret the incident a bit more in a bit more sophisticated way. What William Haslet called Shakespeare's super arrogation, fantastic word, super arrogation. It's the sheer unnecessary ness, the sheer excessiveness of all that, but verbal and poetic and circumstantial detailed.
We might use that here. Super arrogation. Why? Why this unnecessary gesture? Maybe then forgetting is a snippet of insight. One of the ways Shakespeare gestures towards a larger, more mysterious interior line of his protagonist's sophisticated character. Critics would like this kind of incident to. Something about the character which is not otherwise obvious, since it's completely obvious that Correlated hates poor people, it's not really very worthwhile to have another example of it.
Freud tells us in the psychopathology of everyday life that even the most apparently trivial of forget things has a motive. For him, it's the motive of repression or self-protection. In Chapter one of the psychopathology of everyday life, Freud analyses his own inability to remember the name senior. And he concludes that besides the simple forgetting of proper names, there is another forgetting which is motivated by repression.
We forget things because we come back to remember them, broadly speaking. So this kind of theory might suggest that Coriolanus forgets the name for some deeper reason. We might read it, for example, giving an insight into the trauma of battle. Shakespeare's very interested in soldiers who come home when we are very interested in that too. To now such Shakespeare's would come home. The psychological consequences of fighting and so on.
And that's enabled us to see in Shakespeare a whole lot of approaches to that from much ado about nothing through to Othello. Lots of male characters in Shakespeare have been to war. Even Petruchio in a very, very small kind of throwaway remarks. But interesting to think what what was supposed to what we could make of that now. Now we're so interested in the consequences of violence on particularly the male psyche.
So perhaps this moment of forgetting then is a glimpse behind Coriolanus is robotic military presentation. This will be important in the play because it's a play which is really, really unwilling to give us glimpses into Coriolanus is psyche Keranen.
This is not a play which many people have liked very much. As I was thinking about this lecturer's, so I tried to think how to take on that fact that it's not just a play that nobody really looks at or thinks about so much, but actually I think people feel they don't like. I'm one of the reasons I think for this is that again and again, the play attempts to get to know Coriolanus, the person.
And again and again, it's rebuffed. Coriolanus himself is not very likeable, but the critical history which has not found the play likeable either, seems to suggest that if a protagonist rejects us, it makes for a play that also rejects us. Or do I mean when I say that the protagonist rejects as well one. One argument would be how few lines of soliloquy there are in this play.
Soliloquy has become for Shakespearean tragedy since at least Hamlet eight years before Coriolanus, a privileged moment where we feel we get some access into the protagonist that they cannot or are unwilling to share with other play characters. The soliloquy makes the audience special and creates a special kind of relationship between the audience and the character,
not always with this tragic character. So with Iago, for example, rather than with Othello, but with somebody who's there onstage, the soliloquies we might expect here as indications of that in a reflection, a fractured into a Sobek public asides. The play is thus constructed in a way that reinforces Coriolanus his unwillingness to plead for anyone's good opinion. He doesn't take the time to persuade the audience, just as he doesn't take the time to persuade the citizens.
He won't work for the citizens votes. He won't work for the audience. His good opinion either, because clearly it's soliloquies an enormously coercive. We know that one of the things when when someone speaks to us directly in the in the theatre is that we are immediately somehow taken into their world. However unwillingly we're on their side, we're closer to them than we are to anyone else in play.
So because of in part because of this, because it correlates is so impermeable, both in both in character terms, but also in structural terms, in the way that tragedy has come to show character. One dominant strand in this whole play is the frustrated attempt to understand Coriolanus himself when he is not onstage and sometimes when he is the main business of the play, is trying to work out what he's like. Even that opening scene that we already just touched on is an example.
The company of mutinous citizens starts by talking about grain prices and their hunger, but immediately diverts the discussion into an analysis of the play's central character. He's a chief enemy to the people. He's a very dog to the commonality. He's also someone who has done services for his country. Opinions on Coriolanus very right at the beginning before we meet him. Soft conscience men can say it was for his country. He did it to please his mother and partly to be proud.
So the revolt over grain prices particularly becomes a debate. About the character of the play's central figure. It's almost as if in Coriolanus, political events are merely the occasion for the in atomising of a central character who can't display himself from the inside out and has to instead do it from the outside in. This is the play in which inner conflict is compulsively externalised. It's a play full of conflict. The conflict class conflict, conflict between the Romans and the VOLSKY is.
But maybe one way of seeing all those projections of a kind of inner conflict, which we're used to seeing through soliloquies as part a kind of tragic South Korea then is thus remains a source and a symptom of dissent. No one can get a handle on it. And I think there's no one inside or outside the plank. There's a scene when he arrives in disguise at the stronghold of his old enemy or Phidias.
Most of that scene is about how difficult it is to describe him. The men who meet him there find it hard to describe his singularity. He had a kind of face. I cannot tell how to turn it. I thought there was more in him than I could think. The sense that Coriolanus is hard to get hold of and hard to describe keeps keep keeps coming up and accompanied with that is a sense that he isn't a person but a thing. I used Folger Digital Texts dot org, which is the best free online texts of Shakespeare.
There's a lot of crappy old texts, Victorian texts which have been put up. I want to weird things about new technologies is that often the actual fundamental scholarly work they use is extremely outdated and old fashioned. But you'd never look at it. It was in a book you have to tell by the book. This looks like an old thing that nobody would care about. So Folger Digital Texta Old is the only and a properly edited, edited modern text online they should be using.
I use that to look for the word thing. One of the one of the aspects of how correlated is it? Repeatedly people reach for an idea that he's not human. They use this word thing. He's a thing of blood. A noble thing. It's reported he leads them like a thing made by some other deity, then nature. Sometimes it's a kind of nothing. That's still the thing. He sits in his state.
A thing made for Alexander Corydon even use the words of himself to express his or is affinity with or videos where write anything. But what I am I would wish me only he. So this is a reading which in repeated use registers correlate its inhumanity. He's a thing, not a man. It's echoed in Wilson Knight's description of him as a blind mechanic. Metallic thing of pride is kind of one of the ways in which it correlates is a sort of superhero in a sort of side slightly cyborg kind of way.
I mean, a kind of externalised X exoskeletal kind of person doing these amazing feats in a rather amoral or kind of troubling, troubling way would be a prise for anybody who does Carloss cost superhero costume. Excellent. Only in Oxford. So arguing for a traumatised Coriolanus has made himself a fighting machine only at great personal cost.
And encapsulating this in this tiny vignette of his forgetting the name of the man who has helped him in the terrible, unspoken scenes inside Correal gives us a brief moment of access to a more a. a more accessible and more broken Coriolanus. One of things about our current and the superheroes are not from not too far from this. Actually, one things about our current interest in male heroism is very much, I think, about that kind of broken, beaten up, reconstructed, scarred kind of individual.
And that's where all lots of heroes, you know, Bond, Batman, those kind of people, that's where they've all got to is in that in their lives. So so, of course, this is something which we're interested in now. We want to be interested in it 25 years ago now. It also, I guess, the idea that you have some still on the idea, why does Coriolanus forget in a more kind of psychic psychoanalytic way?
Why does he forget the name? Perhaps, but what correlates is suppressing is the knowledge that we already have. Coriolanus is a byword for treachery in this period. The knowledge that he, too, will act against his own side in the future conflict with Roe so is talking about what is actually an act of treachery. The man in correal cooperates with the enemy i.e. correlates rather than with his own side. So it's him, himself and his own treachery or his own future treachery.
Coronets is thus forgetting the American psychological manual defines post-traumatic stress disorder in terms that are strikingly similar to many character analysis of Coriolanus. I didn't say that because it makes it right, but I say it because there are kind of converging that they're converging discourses. Sense of numbness and emotional, blunting detachment from other people, unresponsiveness to surroundings, anhedonia, which is a word I've never used before.
And it's such a great word. It's unfortunate. It means the inability to experience pleasure. Anhedonia, avoidance of activities and situations reminiscent of the trauma. So the forgetting anecdote then in Coriolanus gives us the psychological equivalent for the audience of the ghoulish, which the citizens in the play have to see. Coriolanus is wounds we all want to see beneath the exterior. Coriolanus doesn't want to show us that.
But according to the procedures, both a Freudian analysis and of character criticism, he can't help but let it slip. He tells us something that he didn't intend to tell us in this act of forgetting. Now, if you listen to any more of his lectures or come up in future weeks, you'll gather that I'm generally sceptical about characterological interpretations to the kinds of questions that players ask us, or at least.
I wonder if there are some more interesting ways we can think about ideas of dramatic character, answering with a focus on the individual person as if he or she were real rather than a cluster of words on the page. Tends to skew our interpretations away from the constructiveness of the players, the whole structure of the play as a whole. It may be to fall prey to what sociologists call a dispositional over a situational view of the play world.
It is positional view means that you believe all the old things are caused by human beings. They're all that. They're all caused by people acting. Situations mean you're interested in the kind of the broader the broader situation, the broader circumstance for the extra external framework in which things happen.
And I guess I'm try to move from a dispositional one, which we've just been talking about, to a more situational one in the sense that identity is a product of the private individual A. It's a view of human character that 20th century psychology has completely normalised. But there are ways in which early modern understandings of motive and action were more situational, no more conscious that people acted as they did because of external factors rather than internal compulsions.
We've also come to see that identities are performed, invented and projected as much as they are internalised. And clearly, of course, the theatre. It's a really great way to see that. So in the last saw photos of the lecture, I want to take up the challenge of that moment of forgetting in Act one with which we've been focussing to try to develop two different ways of rethinking character and how character works in this play.
One is to think quite closely about naming character as a property of the name, and the other is to think about character as performance. So let's think about naming first, forgetting that single name in that tiny vignette which I've blown up to be so important in the play, forgetting that name becomes, I think, overdetermined in Corey Linus because of where it comes into play.
The main purpose of the first act of the play is to give Coriolanus his name because it's not a coincidence that Coriolanus goes and smashes that correal. Obviously, he gets his name from smashing up correal. The man who is known in the first scene to the play as Caius Martius gets Coriolanus as an honorific in recognition of his bravery. About 35 minutes into the play, although lots of other Shakespeare characters undergo status or name changes during the course of their play,
obviously it's quite common idea in history plays. None adopts their new name as the name of the play and how the play, both its characters and in its print apparatus of stage directions and speech prefix is how the play names. This character, I think, is worth examining how it comes to know that this person is Coriolanus. So the play takes his name, as I said, from the honorific given to CAIS Martius in recognition of his exceptional bravery at the Volsky in town of Correal.
At the end of Act One, his grateful soldiers cry all cry Martius. Marcia starts their staged action, all cry Martius Martius and Comenius. The General declares him Coriolanus. That's in one scene 10. The Folio text printed in 60 twenty. It's the only early authoritative text of Coriolanus which isn't printed in in quarter form. Before that, the Folio text continues to label the reluctant Hero Martius in speech prefixes throughout the remainder of that scene.
So Comenius calls and Coriolanus, but the play doesn't quite catch up with that new name. It's not until his triumphant entry as Coriolanus crowned with an Oaken Garland in2 one that the play's apparatus gives us the eponymous tragic character correal short for Coriolanus. So there's something about the structure that set about the structure of the acts. It's at the beginning of Act two.
The Carolinas emerges. In this net new name, so curliness his tragic name and with his with it, his ID is the place tragic figure. Is that somehow rather belated? He kind of grows into that figure rather than being presented at it. It gives a strange, strange structure to the play. I think one of the things that's happening in the second half of Shakespeare's career is really trying to experiment with the shape of his plays. Not something which we almost entirely lose in the modern theatre.
We think of the place falling into two halves so the theatres can make money selling drinks in the interval. These are players which don't fall into never fell into two halves. They weren't written to fall into two halves. They fall into quite different breaks. If this is a Blackfriars play, then the ACT break is the most important one because as you know, Blackfriars candles needed to be trimmed in between the act because the play was lit by candlelight.
So there's something about the naming and the act structure which seems somehow to work together. I think. Moreover, the new name Curry Lameness serves to upset rather than confirm Martius, its previous name during the Foley attacks. Comenius names his general, Marcus Cryos, Coriolanus, Marcus Kiester, Coriolanus, and it's a formula which is repeated by a group Omnis Everyone.
So many editors from Nicholas Row, who is the first modern editor of Shakespearean 70 No.9 onwards, have corrected the names to the more proper, more correct Caius Martius. Kairis Martius is not called Marcus. That's a different name. He's called Cast Martius. But in the Folio, he's called Marcus in North Translation of Plutarch Coriolanus. His new name prompts a long digression, which Shakespeare must have read with numerous examples, which is about how Roman names work.
What's the first name? What's the surname? What's the family name? What's a name you can get for being brave or whatever? So most goes on and on and on about names at this point. And that somehow, I think has collapsed into this this texture of naming at this point in the place. It's odd then to see the Folio commit a double mistake. Marcus Kiester Coriolanus inverts the order of the names should be Caius Martius and turns Martius into Marcus.
The footnote to the play's most recent edition does nothing to clarify. This is this is Peter Holland's footnote from the Ardern Shakespeare at the Photios order for the name is repeated later and hence is unlikely to be an error. It plays the emphasis on the character of Martius, the man who belongs to the God of war. Mars, of course, Martius belongs to Mars, but in fact he's actually called Marker's here.
Now, the effect of these models mean that the folio text of the play inadvertently forgets Coriolanus is named in the act of bestowing it. You see what we did there? This is a scene about forgetting textually. The play keeps forgetting names. Coriolanus then forgets the names you put. Either of those could be accidental or incidental or unimportant, but put them together. And there's a kind of Oscar Wilde quote, waiting to come out.
Maybe there will be a way to extend Freud's analysis of forgetting names to treat the text rather than its central character as the patient. Perhaps trauma or repression might be for some reason, the condition of the place self rather than a private property of its hero.
Perhaps that might be a way using Freud's idea about forgetting or about error in the psychopathology of daily life might be worth thinking about textual errors, which tend to be, which in some ways are the most interesting things about Shakespeare's plays, but tend to be written about in the most boring way.
So my argument here is that the kind of mess and confusion about names in the Folio text here seems more than accidental or trivial because it's followed within a couple of minutes by that amnesia over the poor man in correal that we've been discussing. So the play underlines, that's to say the importance of and the fugitive nature of naming, not description of the way that Roman names are allocated, offers a map for different models of personal identity.
Names can be got from family. They can be got from the deeds of the individual. They can be they can be got for some kind of particular intrinsic quality. So you could you can get your name or your identity from your inheritance, from your own deeds or from something about what you're actually like internally. These are all forms of naming in Rome custom. And these associations, I think, indicate some of the many ways in which the play refuses to separate out individuals from each other.
It's got a much more contextual sense of how individuals operate. The scene of Virgilia and Volumnia is embassy to the exiled. Coriolanus in Act five is a good example because Coriolanus is is used for Coriolanus to utter the vein, which much quoted really interesting quotation. He coronate his wishes.
Man were author of himself. Man were author of himself, says Coraline's has this kind of fantasy at this point, perhaps as many people would do, and be set by their family wanting something from them. He fantasises a version of his own identity was free of that, which was the name Coriolanus, in a way, the name that he has got for himself through his own deeds.
Now, I mentioned at the beginning that this play has some potential affinities with the players around it in Shakespeare's writing career. Obviously, most people will put correlates with other Roman plays because they would think that Roman illness, real money tax is the most important thing about it. Or they might put it with other tragedies, which I guess is the drift of the kind of character criticism I've been talking through.
But we might also think about the play chronologically, looking at a modern edition like the complete Oxford Shakespeare or something which puts the players in putative order of competition, just throws up some of the things that are going on at the same time. If we did that, we would see that probably the play, which is closest to Coriolanus in time, is the play parallelise. And I'm interested in how Coraline's might have thought to anticipate the late romances.
Late romances are all about the way in which broken or alienated men like parallelise. Likely oddities in The Winter's Tale are healed by the reunion with female family members who returned wife the lovely virginal daughter. Now it's a sign of the weird gender complexity of Coral Ennis's family, which you don't have time to go into. That's a really, really, really interesting, really, really interesting topic.
And I guess Janet Edelmann, great book, Suffocating Mothers does what it says on the Tin is the best that John Edelmann ATV LNA. And so it's a sign of the complexity of Coraline's his family that is not his wife and daughter, but his mother and his wife, who come to A.M. to try to persuade him not to attack Rome. But the structural suggestion is the same, that in that five of the play, the broken man would encounter. He's been my relatives and turn the course could turn from tragedy to comedy.
That's how the romances work. We think that this in Coraline is perhaps is going to bring him back to make him hold to reintegrated. But in fact, the success of their persuasions, he does agree not to attack Rome, make it inevitable that he's going to die. He's not like his romance successor is going to have a new lease of resurrected life. Family in Coriolanus is a sign of weakness, not as the coming players will try to recuperate it.
An ultimate sign of strength, that desire to please his mother, which we hear in the opening lines of the play, returns as the site then of Coriolanus. His greatest vulnerability when Volumnia prevails with him not to sack Rome. He acknowledges that the piece is most mortal to him. Faithful mother. Mother. What have you done? Volumnia taunts him with the own with with with this with the implications of his own name to his surname, Coriolanus belongs more pride than pity to our prayers.
What Coriolanus is called becomes increasingly fractious in the play's final scenes. And I'll leave you to have a look at that. But the idea that the ways that names circulate around is equally Martius is called Coriolanus. Is it called boy, which is one of the things or Filius says, which is most offensive to him. 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 occupy that name.
Many tragic heroes talk about themselves in the third person and disputes over what a name means or who has the right to occupy it. Are often the visible or external sign of psychological breakdown here in Coriolanus, the proper name, therefore, as a symbol of personal autonomy and individuality, it's held up for particular scrutiny. We see names being made in this play and we see how they're being used and we see something of how that affects the individual who bears them.
Perhaps the permanent forgetting of an offstage character's name gestures to the importance of that investigation. One last point then about theatre. I've already mentioned the possible importance of the new Blackfriars to the writing of Coriolanus. Blackfriars was an indoor theatre with a smaller, more elite clientele, a higher ticket price and baroque stage effects made newly possible by candlelight as opposed to the Open-Air Amphitheatre star playhouses like The Globe.
If you're interested in finding out more about this, look up the Sun Wannamaker Theatre, which is newly opened as part of Shakespeare's rebuilt globe on Bankside. But the somewhat to make a theatre is really majored on lighting effects and how the kind of murkiness of Jacobean tragedy has its visual counterpart in that the kind of lighting effects that this theatre was able to do.
But I'm not so interested in lighting for now, and I'm more interested instead in the potential class aspects of this venue. This is a play, as we've already discussed, which has class as one of its most prominent themes. Coriolanus characterises his reluctance to seek the people's voices in the language of metaphor to the personal political display, which is demanded by the citizens, is repeatedly characterised by this reluctant military hero as a piece of bad drama.
It is a part that I shall blush in acting, says codenames. It is a part that I should clash enacting. Right at the end of the play, Coriolanus acknowledges himself as a player again, like a dull actor. Now I have forgot my part. Coriolanus does not want to be an actor. He does not want to display himself before hungrily consuming audience. That's a perfectly legitimate position for a soldier to take.
But it is a bit of a problem for a character in a play and particularly a character in a play in a new theatre with high ticket prices and seats arranged close to the stage in order to get a good view. Coriolanus, that is to say, is somehow at odds, not just with the political environment in Rome, but with the social and theatrical environment of Blackfriars. Audiences tend not to like performers who show that they feel disdain for them.
There's something therefore suicidal about Coriolanus, not just as a military hero who doesn't care about personal personal hurt and not just as an alienated Roman who was banished from his country, but also as a performer who goes into a play saying at every stage, I do not want to perform for you. I don't want to show you. I'm not going to do what you want.
So the disdain that he shows for the play's audience of citizens attaches itself to the theatre audience is isn't interesting about trust going on there that that although Coriolanus is immediate audience on stage are the lower classes. The extended audience of Blackfriars are in some ways that sort of London patrician's. And what was going on that I leave that as a kind of question rather than something that's worked through.
But the question of whether we need to like Coriolanus for the play to work seems to me a pressing one. And one which criticism has implicitly answered with, yes, we do need to like him in order for the play to work. And no, we don't. And no, it doesn't. Discussions of Shakespearean tragedy and character tend to be drawn, of course, to Hamlet. Hamlet holds out his shiny interiority to us like a kind of psychological click bait.
I've never used that word before and I was very pleased to use it. Then Coriolanus reveals itself. By contrast, to be preoccupied with problematise in the very issue of character itself, Shakespeare's final tragedy, I think, performs that inscrutability. The Hamlet talks about Hamlet's always saying you don't know what it's like to be me. It was like inside me. We thank God we do. We've heard you go on and on and on and on about it in Coriolanus.
We really don't know. I think we not given that access. So Hamlet talks about it, but Coriolanus performs it at every moment in Coriolanus, where dramatic identity might be secured through family, through social position, through the soliloquy, naming consistent action and self-knowledge all the time to get character turned back on itself in a kind of ironic self-analysis. Even at the very end of the play, Coriolanus is still subject to multiple interpretations.
This has been a play about the kind of conflict between Carlina's and his almost alter ego brother, friend, enemy or Phidias. So you would think that they would Ophiuchus would kill him in single combat. That would be the way that kind of slightly homoerotic kind of wrestling between more than slightly homoerotic wrestling between them would play out of ideas, would kill him. And Coraline's would kind of it would be a kind of orgasmic death in a way.
We don't get about Carlina's is attacked physically by a mob in parallel with that verbal dissection of his characters, which the play began with. We met a mob at the beginning. We get another mob at the end. In each case, what they're trying to pull apart is Coriolanus, figuratively at the beginning, literally. By the end, the volsky and people turn on him kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him.
And the stage direction, which is the most brilliant stage, they're actually thinking Shakespeare draw both the conspirators and killed Martius, who've taken away Coriolanus, his name from him in the stage strikes no push away kills Martius who falls since I read I can draw the both the conspirators and kills Martius who falls or Phidias stands on him. It's an amazing it is an amazing tableau of diminishment, isn't it?
The death of the tragic hero is usually the moment of you a really kind of focussing on them, a kind of moment of stillness or something, which really even in the act of annihilating them, makes some of the most important thing in the play. He's got something quite different. Coriolanus is denied life, name, dignity and singularity in this final tablet.
Okay, so I wanted to try and think about that tiny scene of the forgotten line correal to draw out some of the ways we might think about this would play in the round and the ways we might try and answer big questions about plays in some quite small details. I'm conscious that the portfolio requires you to write really quite small essays, quite short essays and thinking about how you could keep the detail of specific play moments.
I'm drawing some bigger issues is something that I've tried to think about in these lectures. Some of the things I've tried to raise their is about tragedy in generic structure, about the use of sources, about the methodology of character, criticism about early modern theatre, about how we might think about the early printed texts of Shakespeare as kind of critical and interpreted points rather than just factual ones.
Finally then, I touched on the idea just now that we already know what will happen at the end of Coriolanus. Coriolanus was already a known figure before this play. And next week I'm going to try and talk more about the implications of already knowing that play is going to be Romeo and Juliet. And my question is going to be, why that spoiler right in the opening prologue to come back?