(Last of Shakespeare’s stuff for a while!)

Apparently Ralph Fiennes directed and acted in a highly-acclaimed film adaption of this play.  We haven’t seen it, but we plan to someday!

More than any of the Shakespearean tragedies we’ve reviewed so far, The Tragedy of Coriolanus fits the most into the Aristotelian model of a tragedy.

Caius Martius, later named Coriolanus after his decisive victory over the Volscian army at Corioles, had been raised to be a soldier.  He had made a career out of the brutal bloodshed on the Roman battlefields.  It is what earns him the favor of the people, who elect him as consul.

However, when it is required that he pander to soothe a rioting public, he refuses and calls them a “common cry of curs, whose breath I hate” (3.3.124).  When he is exiled from Rome, his first solution to the problem is to join the Volscians in an attempt to destroy the city.  Coriolanus is so accustomed to being rewarded for confrontation he cannot vary his pattern; the trait that brought him to greatness is also directly leads to his downfall.

As always, a few novel things that might be worth reading for:

• Coriolanus’ mother, Volumnia, is a female character who holds more influence on the actions of others than most Shakespearean females did.  In the first act, she has much to say about the value of honor and war:  ”had/I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than/thine and my good Martius’, I had rather had eleven die nobly/ for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.” (1.3.18-21)  Coriolanus, although a full-grown man in the play, makes statements that show how much influence his mother had on his worldview.  Later on, it is she who is most successful in trying to lead him from his own destruction.  Since Shakespeare’s writing for a society in which women were highly devalued, a female character having this much influence is novel.
• After he is exiled from Rome, Coriolanus seeks revenge by joining forces with Aufidius of the Volscians.  The conversation is far too long to type out here, but there are homoerotic—or at least homoromantic—undertones.  A prime example of this can be found in Aufidius’ monologue:  

“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” (4.5.112-7).

It was pretty surprising to find material like this in the Elizabethan era.  18th-century popular British literature was pretty loose with its moral judgements, but with all of monarchy’s regulations regarding what was allowed in theatres (for example, they couldn’t say “God” or similar unless it was in a reverent tone), it’s amazing this somehow got under the radar.  Just further proof that queerness is not a modern-day invention.

There’s not really much to TW for in this.  I mean, Coriolanus does die at the end and there is some discussion of the protagonist’s history as a soldier but most of the action in this tragedy is political in nature.  There is aggression and struggle, but not in the same way that the other tragedies we’ve reviewed had them.

Even though it’s not considered one of Shakespeare’s “great tragedies,” I found it a good read and would definitely recommend it to others.

-Lucy

We were extremely disappointed with Shakespeare for this one.  His treatment of Cleopatra was filled with exoticism and misogyny.

I’ll start with the exoticism because it was so obvious.  Here’s part of Enobarbus’ description of Cleopatra’s personal barge:

“Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,/So many mermaids, tender her i’th’ eyes,/And made their bends adornings.  At the helm/A seeming mermaid steers.  The silken tackle/Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands/That yarely frame the office.  From the barge/A strange invisible perfume hits the sense/Of the adjacent wharfs.  The city cast/Her people out upon her, and Antony,/Enthrones i’th’ market-place, did sit alone,/Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy/Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,/And made a gap in nature.” (2.2.213-23)

This description takes up an entire page and we could probably write a whole paper about this, but I’ll stick with this paragraph for the sake of brevity.  

As we’ve mentioned before, monarchs were considered to be the personification of a country.  So Egypt via Cleopatra’s characterization is:

• mythological in nature (Nereides, mermaids, etc.)
• “strange”
• “invisible”/mysterious
• the “vacancy” and “gap in nature” comments reference the vacuum, which at that point was considered against the natural order and therefore impossible to exist.  (Vacuums were proven possible in 1650 by Otto von Guericke, more than 40 years after Antony and Cleopatra was written.)  The last three lines basically mean that the air would have gone to see her to if that wouldn’t have caused a vacuum.  So Cleopatra’s very presence is portrayed as something that is a threat to the perceived natural order.

Noting that none of the Roman characters get this kind of Romantic description, it’s obvious that Shakespeare is trying to write Egypt and its people as an exotic and magical Other.

A lot of people criticize how Cleopatra’s lines portray her as a love-struck young fool.  We think that there is room for interpretation; depending on how the lines are delivered, her words can vary could be naive or manipulative or just affectionate.

But the treatment Antony’s feeling for Cleopatra is what gets me.  Pretty much everybody makes some kind of disparaging comment about how having feelings leaves Antony “transformed/Into a strumpet’s fool” (1.1.12-3).  

Even considering the Roman ideal of stoicism, Shakespeare spends far too much time describing Antony’s affection for Cleopatra as unmanly and dishonorable.  I can see it being said once or twice—we’re not saying that writers can’t have horrible people say awful things sometimes—but Shakespeare took pretty much every opportunity to say that Antony is letting Cleo wear the pants and therefore Antony should be a subject of ridicule.

This takes Cleopatra—one of the most recognizable politically powerful women in recorded history—and turns her then-rare position as a woman in power into a punchline for people’s amusement.  

That this misogyny is one of the most influential portrayals of the last Egyptian Queen is irritating to no end.  I think we would like to go back and punch Shakespeare just for this.

Alright, rant over.  Back to your regularly-scheduled Tumblr dash.

-Peter

TW:  Mention of violence within the play.

We probably shouldn’t have read Christopher Moore’s Fool before this.  Don’t get me wrong; Fool is a good comic take on the play.  It’s just hard to block the foul-mouthed goofiness while reading the work it references.

(BTW, there are huge differences between the Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear.  We read a conflated version that tried to merge the two together.  It doesn’t quite have the scholarly weight as the original two but Norton Anthology people decided it was good enough, so I’m going off of that.)

King Lear has to be one of the most nihilist plays we’ve ever read, second only to Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry.  There’s a lot of focus on the destruction and decay of Lear’s hold on reality, the cosmos, and the Kingdom.  Since in Shakespeare’s time the monarch was seen as God’s representative and a personification of the Nation, it’s not surprising how all three are intertwined.

I thought that the discussion of what makes a “legitimate” child was pretty novel, considering the time it was written.  Edmund the Bastard claims that he is not as dastardly as popular opinion would stereotype bastard children, but then he proves them right by framing his half-brother for conspiracy to murder their father.  But Lear disowns Cordelia, essentially making her illegitimate, and his two remaining daughters throw him out into the cold.  Legitimacy was an important legal issue of the day, so it was fascinating to watch Shakespeare try to work out this issue on the page.

Don’t read if you’re extremely squeamish.  A Gloucester’s eyes get gouged out onstage, and very little is left to the imagination.

-Alex

When we first started using Tumblr, we told ourselves that we’d write summary/reviews of the literature we have to read for classes. You know, to share what we’ve discovered with the Internet. All of the learning without all of the possibly boring lectures.

It’d be simple, we thought, to write up a little something every time we finished a piece.

That was before the reality of being English Education majors, the one of reading up to 4 books a week, reared its ugly head. Taking technically 20 hours was not helping things at all.

So maybe we can’t write things up for every book/play/whatever we read. But we’ve decided to try doing it again, this time on a regular basis; probably about once a week.

Since we originally commented on readings from our Shakespearean Tragedy class, I’ll start us off from where we left off.

[TW: violence, death]

We really enjoyed The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, although the title is really just false advertising. The tragedy isn’t even focused on Caesar at all, since he spends relatively little time on stage. The character who experiences the Aristotelian model of tragedy—the rise to and subsequent fall from greatness— is Brutus, the man who killed “in a general honest thought/and common good to all” (5.5.71-2).

From a rhetorical perspective, the speeches of Marcus Brutus and Mark Antony were very interesting examples of how to make a good speech.

Brutus does make a convincing argument. His simple prose was honest and humble, which does bring the mob of angry plebeians to his side.

But then he screws it all up by letting Antony stand up and have his say.

Antony knows how to take Brutus’ argument and knock it down piece by piece. Brutus claimed that the assassination was noble; Antony presents the crowd with Caesar’s bloody corpse, which is riddled with stab wounds. His words are filled with grandeur—they’re even written in iambic pentameter, which Shakespeare always used as shorthand for “what I’m saying is a Big Deal, y’all.” Brutus claims that Caesar was ambitious, but Antony turns that around and makes the conspirators seem like power-hungry fools.

Antony plays the audience, drawing in their attention by withholding the reading of Caesar’s will until the end. By that point the Plebeians were already turned against Brutus and the conspirators; then Antony reveals that Caesar left them all money and his lands for public use. It’s really no wonder that they turn so quickly.

Like most of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the interesting stuff doesn’t really happen until Act 3. But the second half is so complex and the wordplay is so interesting that it’s well worth the read.

-S

When we teach Shakespearean tragedy, we’re not going to do Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet.  It’ll be Othello, because it rocks.

-Ivan

thedailywhat:

Animated Shakespeare Summary of the Day: Freelance animator Grant Kolton sums up Romeo and Juliet in 30 seconds for McDonald’s “bite-sized video project.”

First books instead of Happy Meal toys and now abbreviated renditions of Shakespeare classics? What’s next — a literary collaboration with Dave Eggers? WAIT A MINUTE.

[thanks devin!]

Exactly what it says on the tin.

-Peter

TW:  discussions of violence, rape, murder, racism and cannibalism.

There are two opinions of Titus among us.

Option 1:  Shakespeare is trying to work with some particular greek myths and surpass them.  He is also showing how when society falls apart, chaos reigns.  The way he is doing so is just highly distasteful by today’s standards.

Option 2:  This is Shakespeare’s first “true tragedy,” and the reason why the most serious and gut-wrenching moments are played for laughs is that he has no idea what he’s doing.  In short, this just a horrible play.

What we know for sure is this:

-The characters feel that Aaron the Moor is “a devil” because of the color of his skin.  Lucius is implied to have gotten rid of Aaron’s child despite promises to save it.  Once Aaron serves Lucius’ purposes, he is left in a pit to die.  (Granted, Aaron the Moor is by no stretch of the imagination a nice man.  But that’s still a horrible way to die.)

-Lavinia, who is valued for having “virtue” (read:  virginity) is basically passed around as sexual property for her family’s political gain.  Then she is raped by two guys.  To prevent her from telling others who did it, they cut out her tongue and chop off her arms.  Her father, Titus, later kills her because according to his enemy Saturninus, “the girl should not survive her shame/ And by her presence still renew his sorrows ” (5.3.40-1).  Because that’s not endorsing blame-the-victim or slut-shaming at all.

-As part of his revenge plot, Titus kills the two brothers that raped Lavinia and bakes them into a pie.  Then he feeds it to their mother and step-father.

-The most horrible moments, including when Quintus and Martius are framed for murdering Bassianus, are played for laughs.  It’s pure physical comedy.

So yeah.  If this wasn’t attributed to Shakespeare, I doubt it would be studied by English majors today.  But does anyone have different thoughts about this?

-Alex

It’s the first scene and two people are already killed for no good reason.

Titus Andronicus:  The English major’s splatter film.

-Jeremy