Below is an essay/document I wrote for Ralph in the early stages of the film’s development about why Coriolanus might matter to a contemporary audience, beyond it’s sheer drama and entertainment. He wanted to share it with you guys. Enjoy. Check back in later in the week when I’ll be talking to him about his training with the Serbian anti-terror police.

Reminder of the Main Players:

• Caius Martius, later surnamed Coriolanus – Ralph Fiennes
• Tullus Aufidius, general of the Volscian army – Gerard Butler
• Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother – Vanessa Redgrave
• Menenius Agrippa, Senator – Brian Cox
• Virgilia, Coriolanus’s wife – Jessica Chastain
• Sicinius, tribune of Rome – James Nesbitt
• Brutus, tribune of Rome – Paul Jesson
• Titus Lartius, general – Dragan Micanovic
• Tamora – Lubna Azabal
• Cassius – Ashraf Barhom

Reminder of the plot

Why Coriolanus Matters

While a Shakespeare work is always relevant there are moments in history when certain of his plays demand to be staged or re-interpreted, when they are heard and perceived with stunning clarity, when the world envisioned between the walls of the stage or frame of the camera blurs remarkably with that of the world around us. Orson Welles’ Caesar embodied Mussolini’s fascism in 1937 London; Robeson’s frantic and despairing Othello of 1943 was reflective of a segregated and subjugated race; post-Apartheid South Africa grappled with the colonialism of The Tempest; Hamlet has stood out as the oppressed intellectual at various times of occupation in Czechoslovakia; Baz Luhrmann’s post-modern Romeo and Juliet complemented a fast paced age. In Elizabethan England the childless Queen imagined a parallel between the embattled Richard II and herself: “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” Shakespearean theatre holds up a mirror and offers us a chance to look deeply – not only as individuals but as a society. Coriolanus itself has been famously co-opted throughout history, from John Dennis’s 1719 version in which the Volscian uprising was overtly paralleled with the revolt of the ‘Jacobite Fifteen’, to performances in communist Russia and 1930’s France. In post-war Berlin the play was banned by American authorities for fear of recalling memories of the recently vanquished Nazis.

So what can Coriolanus mean for us today? From hubristic generals, manipulative spin-doctors, and guerilla insurgents to issues of sexism and devastating food riots the play is rich in potential contemporary significance.

A Hero For Our Time?

Coriolanus is perhaps the most opaque of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, rarely pausing to soliloquize or reveal the motives for his caustic pride. However his infuriating arrogance is at times delicately counterbalanced by an impressive and admirable reluctance to be praised by his compatriots and an unwillingness to exploit and slander for political gain. While he is undemocratic, he is fiercely patriotic. This doubleness brings the play close to Aristotle’s structure of the tragic genre as set out in his Poetics. However, to a greater extent, the work pre-empts the Hegelian form of Tragedy.

For Hegel – in brief – “tragedy is the conflict of two substantive positions, each of which is justified, yet each of which is wrong to the extent that it fails either to recognize the validity of the other position or to grant it its moment of truth; the conflict can be resolved only with the fall of the ‘hero’. Within such a conflict each of the opposed sides, if taken by itself, has justification, while on the other hand each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by negating and damaging the equally justified power of the other. Consequently, in its moral life, and because of it, each is just as much involved in guilt.” (Mark W Roche)

The two substantive positions are that of Coriolanus and “the people.” Despite Coriolanus’ arrogance (his guilt), at various stages and for different reasons we sympathize with his predicament. And despite the fickleness (their guilt) of “the people,” we recognize their voices as politically important. Hegel pronounced these painful junctures, moments of impasse and incompatibility, as foundations for the structure of tragedy.

Unfortunately, the world abounds with leaders and military personnel within whom it is possible to recognize aspects of Coriolanus’ character. The arrogance and intransigence of Bush and Blair make them obvious contenders; Mugabe’s (one of many tyrants) flouting of democracy and abdication of rational political responsibility make him another; with their military backgrounds strongmen such as Pervez Musharraf (who in a final rebuke to his enemies before stepping down as president argued he had ‘shed blood for his country in two wars’) and the late General Pinochet are other leaders who incite comparison. Recently, John McCain gained significant political capital from his air force background and a distinct emphasis on aggressive foreign policy combined with a fervent support for the US military at home. For more overtly militaristic comparisons we might consider two Serbian commanders. The paramilitary leader Arkan can be seen to share significant traits with the Roman general. His searing nationalism and apparent enthusiasm for warfare was in part responsible for his bloody assassination. Another would be the former Serbian General, Ratko Mladic. By his own account Mladic was a student of Hannibal and Alexander the Great. Despite his reverence for lofty predecessors he often railed against contemporary politicians and preferred the company of his soldiers who greatly admired his bravery and instinctive aggression. Mladic ate and slept among his men, patrolled the frontline on foot and often led his troops into battle in an armored vehicle.

And yet for direct parallels we might turn back to 5th century Athens. Themistocles was the hero and great general of the Persian wars who was later driven from Athens by his political enemies who claimed that his overwheening pride and arrogance was anti-democratic. He was also accused of pro-Persian conspiratorial activity. After being exiled Themistocles ended up in Persian controlled territory where he prospered and became a kind of deity for the local people before his death. He was refused burial on Athenian soil by the city’s law courts.

While the character of Coriolanus reaffirms the notion that a prodigious individual can momentarily determine the flow of history, the play reminds us that more often than not history catches up with such people. And it is often with awe that we watch them fall: Saddam moments before his execution, Mussolini swinging from a lamp-post. As King Creon (tyrant or impressive autocrat, depending on your interpretation) of Sophocles’ Antigone eventually realizes:
“The stiffest stubborn wills fall the hardest; the toughest iron cracks and shatters” (528-31)

“The lion I am proud to hunt…”

In 1941 George Orwell wrote: “One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism and national loyalty.” It is a worldview we may well apply to Coriolanus’ Rome, and one that still resonates in many corners of the world today. However, in Shakespeare’s play an aggressive selflessness is counterpoised with an even more aggressive egotism. The drama is driven by intense personal rivalry, by private grievance (Coriolanus’ flight to the Volsci is motivated by a feeling of personal injury) and complex local psychology. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the remarkable interplay between Coriolanus and Tullus Aufidius, which reminds us of the great historic examples of explosive male posturing: Sharon/Arafat; Kruschev/Kennedy; Caesar/Pompey.

While Tullus and Coriolanus profess the deepest hatred for each other, like many celebrated military rivals (Saladin and Richard the Lionheart; Robert E Lee and Ulysses S Grant; Montgomery and Rommel) their vitriol is also tinged with envy, respect and admiration. For Coriolanus, “The great Aufidius….is the lion I am proud to hunt.” And for Tullus, the only fitting comparison to Coriolanus is the great Hector, Prince of Troy. But while Tullus imagines himself as Achilles it is in fact Coriolanus who fights with the same pathological intensity as the Greek. Achilles, like Coriolanus was also famed for his reliance on a powerful mother, Thetis.

In the course of each warriors’ upbringing, cruelty seems to have displaced tenderness. In Voumnia’s household: ‘Blood is more beautiful than milk, the wound than the breast, warfare than peaceful feeding’. Coriolanus struggles to connect emotionally or physically with his wife or his child and both men are most ‘natural’ in the violent arena of war. The erotic energy displaced in them explodes in their famous embrace at Antium, with Tullus declaring:

“O Martius, Martius!… Let me twine/ Mine arms about that body, …/…here I clip/ The anvil of my sword, and do contest/ as hotly and as nobly with thy love/as ever in ambitious strength I did/contend against thy valor. … that I see thee here/thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart/than when I first my wedded mistress saw/bestride my threshhold. …/…Thou hast beat me out/Twelve several times, and I have nightly since/Dreamt of encounters ‘twixt thself and me; /we have been down together in my sleep/unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat… and pouring war/into the bowels of ungrateful Rome/Like a bold flood o’erbear it.”

This graphic sado-masochistic fantasy portrays the pathological mixture of pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity between the two Generals. It is an obsessive desire to emulate and impress one another that approaches physical lust. As the servingman observes: “Our General makes a mistress of him.”

The two men are similarly fiery in their judgments. Tullus is as changeable in his politics as he is in his tempestuous feelings towards Coriolanus. While he initially displays a democratic impulse when considering how to deal with Coriolanus at the end of the play: “We must proceed as we do find the people..”, he allows rationale to be hijacked by the hawkish political ‘faction’ which torpedoes the peace process. What could have been the conversion of both former anti-pacifist “parties” (Rome and Antium) is finally a far more ambiguous and unstable conclusion.

However we imagine the resolution we may well question the extent to which either of these men were ever genuinely interested in a move toward reconciliation.

In the end Tullus cannot emulate Achilles’ final act of cruelty toward Hector and he finally admits to Coriolanus’ “noble memory.” In a funeral speech foreshadowing the rhythms of Auden’s infamous love poem and elegy, ‘Stop all the clocks’, Aufidius’ dejection seems to reveal that he has lost a great part of himself:

“…My rage is gone
And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.
Help, three a’ th’ chiefest soldiers; I’ll be one.
Beat thou the drum, that it speaks mournfully;
Trail your steel spikes…”

“Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come…
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead…”

Who Are Today’s Patricians?

In 5th century Rome there were an estimated 50 patrician clans. These clans were an aristocracy of birth who were supposed to be closer to the Roman gods than the other members of society. They were a coterie of untouchables who dominated politics and monopolized social and cultural institutions. Coriolanus’ abrasive character is partly informed by this tradition of privilege, wealth and power. The Roman Empire has long since fallen but the notion of the Patrician elite is all too true today. Where and how we situate this elite is more ambiguous. Are they a political or social phenomenon? Are they the invisible corporate elites who are periodically revealed after a scandal such as Enron? Russian Oligarchs brokering global oil deals? The various mafias involved in drug trafficking, people smuggling and supposedly state run operations? Politically we might imagine them as a tyrannical dynasty such as the Samoza’s in Nicaragua or culturally reminiscent of India’s caste system or England’s aristocracy. Burma’s military junta encourages an embedded plutocracy, while in China it is old-school Communist party cliques who prosper. The truth is that each country, society and culture has its own patrician class, its own unique hierarchy. The fact that the Roman patricians speak to us so clearly today is evidence of the ongoing, fundamental stratifications of power across the modern world.

One Man’s Terrorist…

In the early stages of the Roman republic Rome was particularly unstable and susceptible to sporadic attacks from discontented local tribes such as the Volsci and the Aequi. These groups harried the city and resented its territorial domination. In virtually every corner of the globe we find a modern day Volsci: a militant insurgent group fighting its corner, demanding greater autonomy. From Uighur separatists in Western China, to the secessionist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia; the ongoing turmoil in Palestine, Tibet and Chechnya to the troubled history of the I.R.A, Sandinistas or the FARC. In Shakespeare’s work the reason for the Volscian uprising is not made explicit. Are they legitimate freedom fighters opposing an imperial hegemony which has left them disenfranchised or merely marauding mercenaries seeking power for power’s sake? If we take Tullus’ servingman as representative of the Volsci temper then the latter argument holds true:

“Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as/far as day does night; it’s sprightly, waking, audible and full of/ vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf sleepy,/ insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a/ destroyer of men.”

With whom are we to sympathise? We would do well to heed the words of Wole Soyinka: ‘The search for a moral anchor in Shakespeare leads sooner or later to the vast arena of unresolved moral questions in his work’. The morality is for us to decide.

“We’ll have corn at our own price…”

Recent poor harvests in drought ridden Australia, rocketing fuel costs, a number of natural disasters prompted by climate change, the development of bio-fuels and increased financial volatility in the world markets have led to a recent surge in food prices. Wheat is up 150% on the year; rice prices have trebled; maize, soya bean and meat prices are at all time highs. In Mexico there have been riots due to the rocketing price of corn-based tortillas. A turbulent start to the Soyabean harvest has seen farmers in Argentina protesting over the increased taxes on Soy exports. After two weeks of blockades and strikes 2 million tonnes of Soya destined for China was still in port. There have been violent protests over food prices in Haiti, Egypt and Indonesia. It is the world’s poor who suffer most directly from fluctuations in food prices as a larger percentage of their income is spent on food. As Western waist-lines expand, eating habits change and food waste increases the image of corn mountains in the Patrician’s warehouses become increasingly relevant. The 19th century essayist William Hazlitt said of Coriolanus: “The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.”

In Roman times the manipulation of grain price was a good way for magistrates and tribunes to ingratiate themselves with the citizens of Rome or with the patricians. When you combine probable future water shortages, inefficient farming techniques, changes in dietary habits and increased financial speculation in the food markets with a projected population leap from 6.7 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050, the rioting (and increased starvation) witnessed in Coriolanus could become widespread across the globe. We can only hope that those in positions to effect serious change can act more responsibly than the patricians and the tribunes in Coriolanus.

Spin-Doctors and Demagogues. Always In Demand

In 5th century Rome the implementation of the Tribunate was a political triumph, a result of the hard fought campaign by the Plebeian element of the Roman army to secure greater representation for the citizens. But Shakespeare reveals the corruption endemic to this Tribunate. Sicinius and Brutus are right to be concerned by Coriolanus’ anti-democratic sentiments but their actions are far removed from a sense of public duty. Their underhand political manipulation is a type of demagoguery all too familiar. They are motivated by expediency and self-interest and their methods are depressingly familiar.

A chilling statement from Herman Goering at the Nuremburg trials of 1946 succinctly captures a part of the tribunes’ psychology and methods of coercion: “It’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of its leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked…” The weapon wielded by the tribunes is the same as that often wielded by politicians, media and many people in powerful positions: fear.

From fevered claims of Iraqi WMD’s and apocalyptic flu pandemics to the idea that we are living in broken societies beset by knife toting gangs, it would seem that we are living in perilous times. But who gains from a climate of fear? Only those keen to perpetuate the myth. If people are prompted into asking the wrong questions, those in power needn’t worry about the answers, let alone the questions that really matter. Paranoia is a money spinner and wins votes. While the diffusion of news through technological advancement is a good thing, hidden agendas can also put people on constant alert at a time when, according to the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, “we are living through the most peaceful period in history.”

The fickleness of the people in Coriolanus and their lack of rational judgment is almost as infuriating as Coriolanus’ disregard for them. The message then, as it must be today, is that complacency can be fatal. Empowerment requires effort. As we know, WMD’s were a myth, devastating Avian flu pandemics have not yet surfaced and violent crime in Britain is in fact falling.

Speak, that I may see thee…

Women were perpetual minors in Ancient Rome. They could not attend, speak at or vote in political assemblies, nor could they hold office. Women were traditionally praised for silence and invisibility. They were not named in public but instead took their father’s names. Male guardianship of women was customary; few could read or write and they were expected to spend the majority of their time in the home. Two thousand five hundred years ago women in Ancient Rome were on a similar footing to women in recent Afghanistan under the Taliban. While Volumnia is a force to be reckoned with she is well aware of a strict gender hierarchy and one of her ambitions is to mould Virgilia into a model of female subservience. While Virgilia’s lack of agency is understandable within the Roman context, for today’s audience it may act as a reminder of a lasting injustice often conveniently put to one side.
Women today receive only 51% of male wages; 75% of the world’s refugees are women. Women in India, Algeria, Iran, China and Sudan suffer daily human rights abuses. Reports of rape being used as a tool of intimidation and ethnic cleansing are depressingly familiar. Western countries are also culpable: 8 million US girls are sexually abused before 18; 79% of Western parliamentarians are men; women hold only 3% of senior positions in the UN. While gender inequality may not surface as regularly or in as brutal a fashion in Western countries in many places prejudice still simmers beneath a veneer of impartiality.

Conclusion

To imagine Coriolanus merely as a mirror for contemporary events would be reductive. The work lives according to its own mechanisms, constantly reinvigorating itself through its own variety and potential. While Shakespeare’s language is rarely more abrasive or his drama more involving than it is in Coriolanus, the function of this essay has been to show how its characters, themes and acute understanding of real politic still resonate today. That Coriolanus speaks to us so urgently and coherently makes it imperative to revisit, confront and try and understand this fascinating and complex work.

Cheers, guys.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog: Interviews with Actors Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain and Paul Jesson
• Blade of a Knife: Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog: Exclusive Concept Art and News From His New War Film, Shooting in Belgrade
• Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog — Understanding the “Boys and Guns” Mentality With Dragan Micanovic and Ashraf Barhom
• Blade of a Knife: Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog — Cast and Crew
• SPOILER!!!! The Story of Coriolanus
• Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog: “There Will Be Blood” — New Photo of Ralph and Gerry, Plus an Interview From Set