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A Coriolanus in Our Future?
 A
little tired of politics? Of course you are.
We all are. Well, I have a treat for you: Shakespeare’s least-known
great play, Coriolanus, the story of a brave and honest
(though not always amiable) man who hates politics with all his heart.
It’s a tragedy fraught with magnetic eloquence and unexpected  lessons
for our own time.
I
discovered it in 1962, when I was 16, through Richard Burton’s
thrilling recording of it. Long before he became famous for, well, other stuff,
Burton had made the role his own on the stage, and this recording is still the
gem of my large collection. Vocally, nobody, not even the great Olivier, could
have topped Burton’s astoundingly resonant performance (which
Olivier himself saluted as “definitive”). Listen to it once, and I
guarantee you’ll never forget it. The play reveals a side of
Shakespeare the classroom never prepared us for. Sweetest Shakespeare,
fancy’s child? Warbling his native woodnotes wild? Not hardly.
Molded by
his inhuman mother, Volumnia, who makes Lady Macbeth seem like a soft
touch, Caius Martius is a proud Roman patrician and matchless warrior,
surnamed Coriolanus for his virtually single-handed conquest of the Volscian
city of Corioli. He becomes the most popular man in Rome, but popularity
means absolutely nothing to him, except baseness. He can seldom speak in
public without causing a riot.
Despite his
heroism, Coriolanus hates and despises the common people so bitterly that
when he agrees, reluctantly, to seek the consulship, Rome’s highest
office, he refuses to show the voters his wounds — he even hates
being praised himself — and he insults them: he can’t bear to
seek their favor. It’s too humiliating. He says he deserves to be
consul, whether they like it or not, and especially if they don’t.
“Who deserves greatness Deserves your hate.”
He calls
them “scabs,” “curs,” “rats,”
“measles,” “fragments,” “the
rabble,” “barbarians,” “Hydra,”
“slaves,” “the beast with many heads,” and
“the mutable, rank-scented many”; with sour wit, he allows that
they display “most valor” only in “their mutinies and
revolts,” but on the whole he is not a people person.
Tempers
flare; Volumnia (wonderfully played by Jessica Tandy in the Burton recording,
by the way) and his patrician friends try to calm him down, but a demagogic
tribune calls him “a traitor to the people” and he explodes:
“The ![[Breaker quote for A Coriolanus in Our Future?: Kicking butt on the hustings]](2007breakers/070308.gif) Not
only is Coriolanus rejected, he is banished from Rome. Fearlessly defying the death
sentence, he retorts, “You common cry of curs, whose breaths I hate,
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses
of unburied men That do corrupt my air ...”
As he
departs, he adds ominously, “There is a world elsewhere.” He
joins his old foes Tullus Aufidius and the Volscians, offering them his
“revengeful services,” and leads an assault on Rome that
threatens to annihilate the city — including his family, who plead with
him for mercy when he has spurned all other appeals. (His own little boy, a
chip off the old block, defies him: “I’ll run away till I am bigger,
but then I’ll fight.”)
Even
Volumnia, who made him what he is, can’t understand her son, for
whom compromise is impossible. Yet when it comes to slaughtering his own
flesh and blood he relents, and Rome is spared.
Now he
must placate the angry Volscians, but tact is not his strong suit. When
Aufidius taunts him as a “traitor” and “boy of
tears,” he roars in final defiance, “Cut me to pieces, Volsces.
Men and lads, stain all your edges on me.” He reminds them that
“like an eagle in a dove-cote, I fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it.”
All of which
comes in refreshing contrast to politicians who prate about “the basic
decency of the American people.” A John Edwards or Barack Obama
has had to suppress his inner Coriolanus, if he ever had one. It’s been
a long time — alas, too long! — since a candidate addressed us
frankly as “scabs” and “curs.”
Imagine a
presidential hopeful buying TV time to look us in the eye and say,
“Listen up, you faggots.” Such a man could bring this country
together. He’d be assured of plenty of media buzz. He might be harder
to ignore than, say, Louis Farrakhan.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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