My project of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays as I come across them in free piles, thrift stores, and charity sales continues on. For the most part, this acquisition procedure has meant reading the plays that I assume are typically assigned in schools: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, Richard III, Henry IV and V, and so on — ones I’ve read before. But a few weeks ago, at the AAUW book sale in Bernardsville, New Jersey, I came across one of the works I knew next to nothing about: Coriolanus. And while I wouldn’t go so far as T.S. Eliot and claim that it is superior to Hamlet, its relative obscurity seems undeserved.
Coriolanus is a prototype for a certain type of monster movie — I’m thinking of The Amazing Colossal Man — where the protagonist, after performing some heroic acts, is spurned and cast out of society, upon which they transform into an implacable monster seeking mindless revenge. In fact, a student could write a book report on Coriolanus simply by listening to Black Sabbath’s “Ironman.” But at the same time, it is also a rudimentary, ambivalent fable about class struggle, which is probably one of the reasons the play isn’t so well disseminated to the public.
The plot of Coriolanus takes the audience through the monster’s martial exploits, his political failure, his coldly calculated treason, and his ultimate inability to follow through on his vengeance. It begins with Rome, having recently resolved its own civil unrest, facing a threat from one of its subjugated peoples, the Volsci. After more or less singlehandedly subduing one of the Volscian cities, Corioli, the play’s protagonist, Marcius (or Martius in some versions) — a bellicose, robotic Roman who spends much of Act I literally covered in blood — is given the cognomen Coriolanus for his deeds. Hence the play’s title, which refers as much to this honorific, and the gap it opens between Marcius and his public reputation, as to the man himself. From the time this title is bestowed on him, Marcius loses his already tentative grasp on his identity and finds himself frustrated, misconstrued, and manipulated by everyone he encounters.
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