Coriolanus

I finished Coriolanus, the last of my Shakespeare plays, at the Tea Lounge in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Not where we live, but where we often visit. The Tea Lounge is a unique coffee/tea shop (except for the other Tea Louonge relatively close by). We spent alot of time there this fall when we didn't have Internet at home, since they have free wireless. The decor of the Tea Lounge is unimaginably cool; first, it's enormous and I mean warehouse-enormous (which in New York is rare): it's both wide and open, crappy couches fill the space, the coffee bar turns quickly into a real bar, massive fans sway above your head, and they often play truly good music (and usually the whole album!) like The Beatles, Nirvana, and Bob Dylan. A couple warnings: food is expensive and not all that spectacular, the place can be packed on weekends with a mix of hipsters and Brooklyn yuppies, and on weekdays it is the place where all the young mother's gather (and my god there is a lot of them in Park Slope!) for play-dates, for gossip and knitting, and other activities which you wouldn't expect in 21st Century Brooklyn but occur nonetheless .

It was a rainy day in Brooklyn, and our plans for a picnic in the botanical gardens were therefore postponed. So instead we spent three hours at the Tea Lounge. I finished the play, reading the final bear-the-dead-like-a-soldier speech, while my fiance simultaneously read the chapter in Little Women where Jo declines Laurie. What symbol might be drawn from that conjunction, I don't know. But it was fun, nonetheless. We celebrated my completion of Shakespeare's play by proceeding to a market and picking up salmon and Kronenbourg for dinner. It was all in all a lovely, surprising Saturday. In New York City any weekend where you don't do much of anything--where you remember that simple days are still possible--is a good one.

Coriolanus proved a difficult play to get into, although the play begins with action: a blossoming of various battles (which seems a rarity for Shakespeare, there was very little exposition). The first act feels initially as though it should be the fourth or fifth. I did finally get grasped by the play, but by the end I didn't feel fully moved or astounded. Plot-wise the play is very well put together, and it certainly deals with some interesting issues, but I felt it lacked the emotional punch of almost every other of Shakespeare's tragedies.

The story is pretty simple, Coriolanus is a soldier through-and-through, a man who performs daring and near god-like deeds in warfare. However, his inability to double-speak or make love to the plebians of Rome causes his downfall and eventual banishment from his home. To revenge himself upon his citizens, he joins with an old enemy, Aufidius, to storm the gates of Rome and lay waste to the city. Militarily, he is set up to succeed, but he is finally convinced to seek a truce when by his mother. As revenge, and partly as a way to regain his own status, Coriolanus is murdered by Aufidius. Shakespeare took the story from Plutarch's Lives.

The main set-up of the story, as I see it, is the tension between Coriolanus, a man of action, utterly incapable of duplicity, and the nature of Rome (or political states in general) where one must be able to play the political game, i.e. being a war hero is not enough. Coriolanus can often be compared to Achilles, the greatest war hero of war-heroes (although, I felt Coriolanus lacked the potent mix of raw fierceness and knee-jerk passion which Achilles represents so well). Both men achieve great military victories for their state, both men feel underappreciated, and both men meet tragic ends. It could be argued that Achilles' blend of undiluted anger and arete is more more accepted by the society of Ancient Greece than Coriolanus' same qualities in later Rome, but I think that's overlooking the consistent reactions of the Greeks to Achilles in The Iliad; Achilles is often lectured by Agamemnon and Odysseus for his temper, he is treated as a child, unable to grasp the political realities of Ancient Greece. While it is certain that Achilles was revered throughout classical Greece as a hero worthy of emulation, I don't think The Iliad itself makes it so, the portrait painted there is too complex. The same stands for Coriolanus. While a war-hero and a man who lives up to his word (except in foregoing the destrcution of Rome), Coriolanus is still protrayed as petulant, almost stupid, and certainly a mama's boy. He is only kind of worth his hero-status, only kind of worth emulation. Perhaps, what this best attends to is the sense that certain aspects of society should not be forced to mix. In other words, soldiers--even the greatest--should not be forced into politics by default. Just as being a politician does not automaically make one a good soldiers. With that I'll let the heroes lie.

One nice coincidence: I finished my Shakespeare-play-completion on April 22nd, but I read the Introduction on the 23rd--Shakespeare's (supposed) birthday. It seemed fitting.

That evening in Park Slope, as my girlfriend and I walked from the Tea Lounge to the grocery, I was saying something about how I was excited that now I had read everything Shakespeare had written.

"Really everything?"

"Yeah, I think so. All the plays, the long poems--you know."

"You've read all the sonnets?"

"Ah...well, no."

And there it is. Now, I've got to pull out the sonnets and get to work. Well...maybe. I think first a break is required. Perhaps a classic children's novel is in the works, one in which I was too deprived to have read as a child.

Much ado.


Book borrowed from the 96th St. New York Public Library.

Coriolanus

By: William Shakespeare

Signet Classics, 2002

Paperback, 384 pages

ISBN: 0451528433