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

Timon of Athens

Rather than begin with an introduction both of myself and of this blog, I will instead begin with a book. I'll shelve that introduction for another time, another place.

I am at the tail-end of a reading journey (which I do not doubt will prove the most fulfilling of my life) of Shakespeare's works; this journey began twelve years ago when I first read A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was on an extended hiatus from school and had checked out the play from our local library. I remember sitting in bed, eating a TV dinner I had microwaved myself, and reading the entire play in one sitting. I felt daring and grown-up. One, because I was home alone and left to my own devices, and, two, because I was reading literature that was clearly beyond me. I probably understood a fifth of it at the time (although perhaps that is being too generous), but I recall laughing whole-heartedly at the lovers' mercurial hearts. The line that sticks out most from that particular reading belongs to Lysander: 'And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake!' I still crack-up at that one when I see the show performed; in most audiences I think I am the only one to laugh.

Currently--what seems a lifetime later--I am reading Timon of Athens on the subway to and from work. This is my last Shakespeare play, but one. After Timon, it's Coriolanus. Once I'm finished with the canon, I don't truly know how I will respond. I suppose I should expect some sense of loss, some cold frigid feeling. After all, unless in my lifetime some lost play of Shakespeare's re-emerges (I'm hoping for Cardino simply because the title is so striking), Corialanus will prove the last time Shakespeare's words will be entirely new to me. But in actuality I don't feel any foreboding toward the end. For one thing, Shakespeare is one of the rare writers whose works I can read (or see) again and again without any trepidation. His plays age better than wine, and are far less expensive (cheap bottle of wine in New York: fifteen dollars, used Shakespeare play: four). Though this view will certainly not gain any points in originality: I attest that Shakespeare is the greatest writer of any age. There is something about his words that is inexpressible, they reach into the deepest valley of what it is to be human--and pull out conundrums. His metaphors, while never unfunctional, are always bold, daring, and replete. He creates characters that are at once bigger-than-life yet at the same time as true-to-life as any person who has ever graced this earth. He is the master imaginer.

But enough of this, I'm certain I will return to 'why-Shakespeare-above-all-others' again in the future. On to: Timon of Athens. I just finished Scene 1 of Act IV, in which Timon curses Athens--with true Shakespearean passion--the city that has grounded his ruin. The play is not one of Shakespeare's best, however I still find myself enthralled. One of the things that intrigues me most is how Shakespeare can write a compelling play centered almost entirely on economic issues (although I shouldn't be surprised: A Merchant of Venice). To me--a person with mostly an artistic and dramatic sensibility--it seems like a rather bland topic. But here Shakespeare brings both the micro-economy of Timon and the macro of Athens into light. He is fascinated by how the decisions one person--or a community--makes with money can so easily shape our fates. What are these gold pieces, these dubloons, these talents, this cash? Of course, Shakespeare doesn't answer this question; it would be ridiculous if he did. But for myself--entering my late twenties--I almost wish he did. Us post-college loaners could use a little Shakesperean advice.

Shakespeare's round-about, open treatment of loaning/lending reminds me of Neal Stephenson's own presentation of cash in Quicksilver. I read that book this summer, and while I did not love it enough to read the two following hefty volumes, I really did enjoy the read (except for the very strange sex/purging scenes). I was especially drawn-in by Stephenson's obsession with money or, perhaps more properly, the rough-and-tumble beginnings of a capitalist market economy where money becomes like air. It's there: we know that because we breathe it, it allows us to live; it's there, but it's no longer tangible. It's tied up. It's invested. It is--beyond true comprehension.

But Timon begins with actual assets, and then loses everything due to unbridled spending. Or does he lose everything because what he invests in (friendship) refuses to pay him back? There is no return on camraderie, certainly not cold hard glittering cash. So here money is not based on material worth or market value, but rather on social ties and social relationships. Or are social ties only corrupted by financial? Maybe. Maybe not. Here is a sign of things to come: there will be no answers in this blog. Answers don't belong in great literature, only questions and musings.

While it sucks to be Timon, at least he's expressive enough to pay back his lackluster friends with perfected cursing. I'll leave you with these impassioned words:


bankrupts, hold fast;
Rather than render back, out with your knives,
And cut your trusters' throats! bound servants, steal!
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are,
And pill by law. Maid, to thy master's bed;
Thy mistress is o' the brothel! Son of sixteen,
Pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire,
With it beat out his brains! Piety, and fear,
Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries,
And let confusion live!


(Library Book, NYPL 96th St.)


Titus Adronicus/Timon of Athens

By: William Shakespeare

General Editor: Sylvan Barnet

Signet, 1989

Paperback, 432 pages

ISBN: 0-451-52269-9