{"id":569,"date":"2016-04-23T11:42:13","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T11:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/?p=569"},"modified":"2016-04-23T11:42:13","modified_gmt":"2016-04-23T11:42:13","slug":"coriolanus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/2016\/04\/23\/coriolanus\/","title":{"rendered":"Coriolanus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Visiting Lecturer, Jonathan Day, offers his thoughts on\u00a0Coriolanus<\/em><\/p>\n

My selection comes from Shakespeare\u2019s Roman tragedy Coriolanus<\/em>. Our hero is Caius Martius, who has earned his honorific title, \u2018Coriolanus\u2019, from his actions fighting the enemies of Rome, the Volsces, in their city of Corioli. Throughout the play Coriolanus has been a singular figure, in conflict with the public of Rome. Rejected from the city, Coriolanus turns on Rome and approaches the leader of the Volsces, Tullus Aufidius, and demands that Aufidius either kill him or use him to conquer Rome. Here is Aufidius\u2019s response to that ultimatum:
\nI loved the maid I married; never man
\nSigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,
\nThou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
\nThan when I first my wedded mistress saw
\nBestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! I tell thee,
\nWe have a power on foot; and I had purpose
\nOnce more to hew thy target from thy brawn,
\nOr lose mine arm fort: thou hast beat me out
\nTwelve several times, and I have nightly since
\nDreamt of encounters ‘twixt thyself and me;
\nWe have been down together in my sleep,
\nUnbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat,
\nAnd waked half dead with nothing.<\/p>\n

This is a play that has seemingly consistently triumphed traditional conservative Roman values. Coriolanus is the warrior who literally forms his identity through war (note the honorific name \u2018Coriolanus\u2019), who subjugates his own welfare to the good of Rome, the warrior who fights to honour his mother and wife and for a future for his son, and is undone by a spirit of resentment that rules amongst a faceless mob. Above all this, the play would seem to suggest the successful man is a figure of magnificent isolation.<\/p>\n

Within thirteen remarkable lines however, Shakespeare deflates all of this. These lines demonstrate none of the martial restraint one might expect of a warrior leader; they are not end stopped, that is to say, they are examples of enjambment. Each line does not contain a single complete phrase or idea but runs on in a stream. The whole speech consists of only four sentences, one of which, \u2018Why, thou Mars!\u2019 serves to disrupt the hypnotic rhythm and prevent monotony. This speech is frankly, almost explicitly, homoerotic in the language of dancing hearts at the appearance of Coriolanus, unbuckled helms, being \u2018down together\u2019 and nocturnal \u2018encounters\u2019. Again, this stands against so much else in the play. Finally, Shakespeare\u2019s language subverts the idea of singularity into duality and interrelationship. The final magnificent sentence has six self-references to \u2018I\u2019 or \u2018me\u2019, six references to \u2018thou\u2019 or \u2018thee\u2019 and two \u2018we\u2019s. This sheer bulk in such a short span of text, combined with the fluid lines, serves to confuse the issue; who or what is being discussed here? This is most clearly present in the final five lines, in which the subject of the sentence is Aufidius himself; due to the dream-like flow of the language, by the time we come to the conclusion, it seems as if the subject is the \u2018we\u2019 of \u2018we have been down together\u2019. It is is Aufidius\u2019s dream, but it seems as if they are both dreamers and have somehow both \u2018waked half dead with nothing\u2019. Why half dead, and what was the \u2018something\u2019 they might have had?<\/p>\n

At the conclusion of the play Coriolanus returns to his identity model of isolation and independence; before his death he proudly recalls his actions in Corioles and remarks \u2018Alone, I did it\u2019. In the section above however we see Shakespeare\u2019s art. It is the characteristic \u2018volta\u2019 or turn, of the sonnet writ large; within a few trance-like lines Shakespeare challenges the seeming grounds of his whole play. In its own way, this passage is as daring as Puck\u2019s suggestion at the end of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream <\/em>that if we disliked the action, we should assume that we have been dreaming. Perhaps we ourselves might awaken half dead with nothing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visiting Lecturer, Jonathan Day, offers his thoughts on\u00a0Coriolanus My selection comes from Shakespeare\u2019s Roman tragedy Coriolanus. Our hero is Caius Martius, who has earned his honorific title, \u2018Coriolanus\u2019, from his actions fighting the enemies of Rome, the Volsces, in their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/312"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":571,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions\/571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}