After World War II, a Shakespearean play was briefly banned by US officials in West Germany. It had been Adolf Hitler’s favourite work of Shakespeare, and performances were strongly tied to the fascist cause. But in East Berlin, Bertolt Brecht thought quite the opposite of the piece: its message wasn’t a celebration of fascism so much as an indictment of tyranny—and an illustration of how tyranny might be overcome. He never finished his adaptation, dying in 1956, but the work carried on, inspired by Communist ideas, and was staged in later theatres.
Coriolanus is the last of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and routinely ranks low among them, in part because the “tragic hero” is so severe in his views, and so ill-suited to self-reflection in the usual ways, that it’s easy to see why only a warmonger might love him—and all others, look guardedly upon the whole conceit of his life story.
Yet like all of Shakespeare’s historical plays, Coriolanus differs from its source material, and from history writ large. His “Caius Martius” is not the “Gnaes Marcius” of Livy’s 1st-century BCE account of the 5th century soldier; nor is he the “Caius Marcius” of Plutarch, whose Parallel Lives inspired the bard’s 1605-1608 play. And when people adapt Shakespeare’s Coriolanus today, they shroud the bard’s words in their own context, too. A 2019 Stratford Festival production starts with a call-in talk-show to stage the play’s political arguments; the 2011 cinematic adaptation, starring and directed by Ralph Fiennes, gives us TV footage from a Balkanized landscape.
Nor is Coriolanus—the version of the man depicted by Livy, Plutarch, Shakespeare, or Fiennes—an exact parallel for many men of war today.
But in a world very much at war today, the sheer fact of this story’s many variations can offer a potent vocabulary for clarifying the forces that keep us embroiled in violence, time and time again.
They just might not be the ones you imagine, though, if you’ve only ever read Shakespeare’s version of the tale.
And this is because, as I’ve mentioned before, when reflecting on the work of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, the past isn’t the strange country we might wish it to be. Our politics have not much changed in these last few millennia, because we as human beings have not much changed. All that’s changed are the names by which we call ourselves, and the technologies with which we convince ourselves of our more “evolved” nature—along with the risk of annihilation that same technology can yield.
For paid subscribers, below the fold, I’ll explore three versions of the tale, and what their differences invite with respect to missteps taken in how we think about the state and all its key actors. But above the fold, for everyone, let’s talk about the 2011 film.
Historically, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is viewed as a clash of political philosophies involving two or three core demographics: the military leaders, the civic leaders, and the masses. In some readings, the first two are two sides of the same coin: both groups of people who feel entitled to their power because they take it, and because they often prove fitness to lead in the civic realm through first excelling on the battlefield. In other readings, military men are the state’s only true actors, because the only “action” civic leaders seem to undertake is using words to placate the masses. In this framing, all others are reliant on the military to sustain their status quo against invasion—and as such, a military man like Coriolanus can only hold the rest in contempt.
Ralph Fiennes streamlines his version of Shakespeare’s story to accentuate these military dimensions, with very little space left for political discourse among the rest. The plot remains more or less the same as Shakespeare’s, though: a place that calls itself Rome is facing unrest on two fronts, domestic and through conflict with a warring tribe. Caius Martius is the contemptuous enforcer of the senate’s grain-hoarding against its own people. He is also the defender of the whole realm against would-be invaders, and when defeating a key city is renamed after it, Coriolanus.
At the height of his military triumph, fellow patricians think that this is a perfect time for him to bid for leadership, but here he refuses to play the game properly. It is beneath him to ask anything from what he considers mere “fragments” of the bodypolitik, the living body of the state. None of the senators shows much real care for their citizens, but many have spent a lifetime masking their contempt in a willingness to engage with the “voices” of the masses. They ask Coriolanus to do likewise, but he will not, and his refusal to give the masses a chance to give him anything—praise, a position in high office, their approval—offers his political opponents an opportunity to turn the crowds against him. From glorious hero and saviour of the realm, he’s turned into a would-be tyrant, and banished.
Except that even banishing is something the people are trying to bestow upon him, and he will not accept a thing from them. “I banish you,” he says—and goes to the only person who in philosophy seems his equal: his military foe, to fight on his side against Rome. Soon after, the state, overconfident and forgetting how much its power was always won by its military, is shocked when Coriolanus shows up leading forces against them—and when no entreaty from a senate member will hold him back.
What ultimately keeps Rome from being sacked is Coriolanus’ mother, wife, and young son, coming to Coriolanus and his forces, and dropping to their knees before him. The words of his mother, Volumnia, move him to see his duty to them, and he consents to make peace. After doing so, he leaves Rome again, to return as a dutiful soldier for the opposing side, but his old foe calls him a traitor, and has him killed.
In Fiennes’ version, there is no glory to this death, or its aftermath. Coriolanus’ body is dropped then like any other dead thing, without vows of remembrance for his deeds (as in the original Shakespeare), and we cut to black. In this act especially, we see the contemporaneous context in which this version of Coriolanus was filmed: the many real wars from the 1990s forward in which all the “sound and fury” in our lives signifies nothing the moment that life has ended.
Fiennes’ version isn’t without fire, though. It brings to life the full sexuality of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in its depiction of the interactions between Coriolanus and his great foe Tullus Aufidius—but for a reason that goes beyond mere sexual titillation. These men hate each other so fully in war that they also cannot help but be in love with one another, too—because they have, in a very real way, committed their lives to one another; and because only in combat with one another do they believe they see their true selves. (What then is Aufidius without his hate of Coriolanus? How then can he ever be his full self in a time of peace?)
As Aufidius says to Coriolanus, when the latter shows up to fight on his side,
Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold. […] Thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me;
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat,
And waked half dead with nothing.
One “tragedy” of the play, then, is that Coriolanus realizes his truth is better reflected by the sight of his family on their knees before him. He cannot recognize the demands of the masses as worthy (and he can only see their asks, and the asks of the senate, as demands in another form). It was therefore easy to think of himself as more fully himself, more “whole”, without them—driven into the lover-arms of an mirror enemy, abandoning Rome in its entirety to whatever fate might await it at his sword.
But the ask that his family sets upon him is unbearable, precisely because it is not an empty demand, an affectation of power from those who won’t commit to its exercise.
No, instead his mother’s ask reminds him that, if he will not save them, they have options. If he will not keep his oath to them, they will go and die with neighbours, or (in the child’s case) try to run away and grow up to fight him later. They are willing to act with intention, in other words, if he will not. They are whole as well, not mere fragments—and in their wholeness, laid on its knees before him, he sees that he is not complete after all: not without honouring his duty to them, too. Coriolanus knows then that, if he allows them to do this, to go willingly into flight or destruction for want of a champion, he will have lost the title of being the strongest among them.
They will have bested him in virtue, when no man in combat could.
O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O, my mother, mother, O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome,
But, for your son—believe it, O, believe it!—
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,
If not most mortal to him. But let it come.
As we’ll see below the fold, for paid subscribers, there is much more to this facet of the story in Livy and Plutarch than Shakespeare reveals. But the Fiennes version is no less potent for its further divergence from earlier sources: quite the opposite.
Read the news these days of Russia’s war in Ukraine, or of the fraught proceedings between Netanyahu’s far-right government and a wide array of Middle Eastern actors embroiled in a war steadily expanding from direct siege in Gaza into conflict zones involving Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the Red Sea (and of course, being treated all the while as a US-Iranian standoff). Can you not feel how much indifference to “the masses” persists in report of government actions between themselves? How many military and state forces are operating in a dialogue centrally with each other?
We have many people who consider themselves both sides of the “coin” of power—our heads of state and heads of military, all rolled into one. And we know that honesty with the rest of us always comes second in such wars. Now, instead, is the time for info wars—and every military and government group involved in active combat is a seasoned hand at issuing precisely the weaponized content they think they’ll need to win our “voices”. And if they see us as fickle and easily swayed, it’s because we are, to some extent—but not because we’re “fragments”, as Coriolanus contemptuously calls the masses in Shakespeare: rather, because we’re an open wound.
The “masses” are not some passive construct. We are an open, skinless bodypolitik, every organ of our civic activities laid bare and vulnerable to attack from governing officials and military threats. But unlike in Fiennes’ version, where the heaving mass of plebeian organs is reduced to protest marches, so that the production can focus centrally on military and political power, the real masses are not only on the streets. They’re tending to the sick in hospital. They’re raising families, and crops. They’re providing the products and services that sustain everyday processes in the state.
One week without a warrior might not always make a difference, depending on the season in state life—but try one week in any season without waste management crews, water filtration teams, and delivery drivers getting key goods from farm to table.
And because this open wound of the bodypolitik is filled with moving parts dedicated to so much else in the maintenance of public life, of course it’s easily swayed by media manipulation and government propaganda. How can it not be, when it has so much else on its daily plate? When does it have time for deeper dives into each state claim?
Fiennes’ version of Coriolanus is very much of our times, because it accepts the core conceit in Shakespeare’s play, and refines it even further. We are expected to accept that those waging war simply know better than we pesky open wounds, heaving with our busywork and reacting so loudly to whatever distressing news next comes down the pipe. Shut up about your protests, and your concern for human life. Accept what you’re fed, and remember: even though these wars afflict you, they don’t concern you.
They’re the work of people who know that power is always taken.
Just who the hell are you?
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