1 00:00:00,930 --> 00:00:05,910 Just a little bit before we get going. These are lectures on Shakespeare. 2 00:00:05,910 --> 00:00:07,350 They're called Approaching Shakespeare. 3 00:00:07,350 --> 00:00:16,470 If everybody's in the right place and their aim is to give you a sense of some Shakespeare plays you might not already know, 4 00:00:16,470 --> 00:00:24,930 but also a sense of kind of methodology, how you might try and turn these plays around in your mind as you come to work towards a portfolio. 5 00:00:24,930 --> 00:00:30,010 One important thing about the lectures is that they're all recorded. The reason I choose you. 6 00:00:30,010 --> 00:00:35,430 Where there are already twenty one lectures on other plays. I'm going to be talking about this term. 7 00:00:35,430 --> 00:00:40,030 So if you have a very distinctive cough that you want to copyright. 8 00:00:40,030 --> 00:00:44,340 Come on street to me about it. Because you hear it. 9 00:00:44,340 --> 00:00:49,440 You'll hear on the recording more seriously. The only disadvantage to you, I think, 10 00:00:49,440 --> 00:00:53,040 is that one thing I've learnt from doing these lectures in the past is never to 11 00:00:53,040 --> 00:00:58,140 refer to a handout in the in the lecture itself because people just email and say, 12 00:00:58,140 --> 00:01:02,310 where is that hand out? And I've absolutely no idea. So you've got to hand out. 13 00:01:02,310 --> 00:01:06,390 Nobody else who listens to it will get one. You just have to try to keep up. 14 00:01:06,390 --> 00:01:15,630 And if the handout isn't very clear, try to email me in the week and also if I can do a better job of it next time. 15 00:01:15,630 --> 00:01:20,140 In addition to that, we won't have questions after the lecture. I think that's quite a relief anyway. 16 00:01:20,140 --> 00:01:25,680 It seems one of the most excruciating. Oxlade, Jonás the post lecture questions. 17 00:01:25,680 --> 00:01:32,100 But that doesn't mean I'm not interested in your questions. And again, email me and my email address by mistake on the one hand outbids. 18 00:01:32,100 --> 00:01:36,410 Oh, it's what you would expect an adult Smith of Hartford. OK. 19 00:01:36,410 --> 00:01:40,030 So I'm going to do really so stilted Segway. That's all not going on. 20 00:01:40,030 --> 00:01:44,260 That's on tape. And then we're gonna stop. Kids are going to feel happy with where we are. 21 00:01:44,260 --> 00:01:55,410 Does everybody have a handout? OK, so this is the first lecture in the latest series in this in the series called Approaching Shakespeare. 22 00:01:55,410 --> 00:02:02,790 The format of these lectures is very straightforward. I tried to get under the skin of the play by asking a single question about it and try and think 23 00:02:02,790 --> 00:02:09,810 how the critical work that's been done on the play might cohere around a single question. 24 00:02:09,810 --> 00:02:15,180 The main aim that is to get you to think about the sorts of resources we might use to think about Shakespeare's plays, 25 00:02:15,180 --> 00:02:22,970 the kind of methodologies or or frameworks we might bring to bear on them and how to ask questions about them. 26 00:02:22,970 --> 00:02:28,630 And I think that be asking questions is really crucial to me. Not so much the answering. 27 00:02:28,630 --> 00:02:35,310 I'm going to try and give it an outline of the play each time. So if you don't know what the play is about, you won't be completely lost. 28 00:02:35,310 --> 00:02:44,760 To start with and because of the plays I've already recorded in this series, I've got a slightly strange grab bag of plays left at this point. 29 00:02:44,760 --> 00:02:48,420 There isn't there isn't a narrative which joins all these plays together there. 30 00:02:48,420 --> 00:03:01,580 Individual lectures and faceplate is Coriolanus. So Coriolanus is a late tragedy, probably written around 16, seven to eight, 16, seven to eight. 31 00:03:01,580 --> 00:03:08,800 That makes it closest in time to Antony and Cleopatra and then to the late play, the so-called late plays. 32 00:03:08,800 --> 00:03:15,140 Apparently, he's moving into Winter's Tale of The Tempest in symbolisms. 33 00:03:15,140 --> 00:03:21,620 I'm going to say more about that context a little bit later. How might that contacts be illuminating? 34 00:03:21,620 --> 00:03:27,320 Coriolanus may have been written with a particular eye to the possibilities of performance at the indoor theatre. 35 00:03:27,320 --> 00:03:31,560 Blackfriars The Kingsmen had just occupied that from 16 acres. 36 00:03:31,560 --> 00:03:35,910 It could be one of the first plays that's got an eye to Blackfriars performance. 37 00:03:35,910 --> 00:03:44,450 Not a little more about that, too, and why that might be interesting to think with rather than just the fact to know. 38 00:03:44,450 --> 00:03:48,380 So the story of the play. Actually, I always find this bit the most difficult. 39 00:03:48,380 --> 00:03:56,540 Actually, the summary for this is this is my go. This. This is the story of a general from Rome's ruling patrician class, Coriolanus. 40 00:03:56,540 --> 00:04:05,210 He turns reluctantly to politics after a successful military career under the tutelage of his powerful mother. 41 00:04:05,210 --> 00:04:11,960 The Lemonier. But Coriolanus is too proud, too angry to something. 42 00:04:11,960 --> 00:04:19,490 We'll talk more about that to make himself agreeable to the people whose support he needs for his candidacy. 43 00:04:19,490 --> 00:04:26,990 The conflict with the people escalates, and it ends up with Coriolanus being banished from Rome. 44 00:04:26,990 --> 00:04:40,860 He decides to go to the camp of his arch enemy or Phidias and to lead off radiuses armies against Rome and turns to join his enemies against Rome. 45 00:04:40,860 --> 00:04:48,050 He's persuaded to be merciful to Rome by an embassy of his mother, Volumnia, and his wife, Virginia. 46 00:04:48,050 --> 00:04:55,400 But this means that he's lost the trust of Orpheus videos his army. They turn on him and kill him. 47 00:04:55,400 --> 00:05:03,680 So the question I want to focus my lecture around may seem, and I think they often do seem so trivial or minor as to be a kind of a joke. 48 00:05:03,680 --> 00:05:08,510 It's not it's not a joke. There will be some jokes in intellectuals, but not this one. 49 00:05:08,510 --> 00:05:14,360 I will try and convince you that this is a question which opens up some big issues. So this is the question. 50 00:05:14,360 --> 00:05:18,290 Much of the first act of Coriolanus is about a major battle offensive, 51 00:05:18,290 --> 00:05:28,390 one by the Romans under Coriolanus against the VOLSKY or Phidias, its troops, the Volsky SBL Alesi by. 52 00:05:28,390 --> 00:05:31,900 As the Roman victory under Coriolanus, his leadership is announced. 53 00:05:31,900 --> 00:05:39,130 The council Comenius tells the young soldier who can have anything he wants as a reward. 54 00:05:39,130 --> 00:05:46,300 This is what Coriolanus says. I time lay here in correal at a poor man's house. 55 00:05:46,300 --> 00:05:53,140 He used me kindly. He cried to me. I saw him prisoner. 56 00:05:53,140 --> 00:05:58,690 I request you. Coriolanus continues to give my poor host freedom. 57 00:05:58,690 --> 00:06:04,240 Of course, as Comenius in a phrase that uncomfortably predicts later events. 58 00:06:04,240 --> 00:06:09,970 Were he the butcher of my son? He should be as free as the wind. 59 00:06:09,970 --> 00:06:13,810 Who is this man? What's his name? By Jupiter. 60 00:06:13,810 --> 00:06:17,410 Forgot, said Coriolanus. I am weary. Yay! 61 00:06:17,410 --> 00:06:21,880 My memory is tired. Have we no wine here? So it's a tie leaving yet. 62 00:06:21,880 --> 00:06:30,250 Corinda says the thing I want most is for the volsky in person who helped me when I was fighting against the city of correal to be to be freed, 63 00:06:30,250 --> 00:06:35,620 to be freed from the prisoner of war. Comenius as fine will free him. 64 00:06:35,620 --> 00:06:40,720 What's his name? Caroline says, I don't know. So why does he do that? 65 00:06:40,720 --> 00:06:47,290 Why does Coriolanus forget the name of his comrade? So we could begin to answer this, I guess, 66 00:06:47,290 --> 00:06:55,540 by acknowledging that the real agency we should be talking about here is not that of Coriolanus, but of Shakespeare. 67 00:06:55,540 --> 00:07:01,290 We all know, of course, that authorial intention is following winds up in Beardsley's famous formulation, 68 00:07:01,290 --> 00:07:10,210 a fallacy asking what the author intended is one of the most visibly unsophisticated manoeuvres of literary interpretation. 69 00:07:10,210 --> 00:07:17,560 But on the other hand, the question of intention is one that wasn't quite go away. 70 00:07:17,560 --> 00:07:23,740 If you're drawn to that kind of and if you're drawn to that as an interpretive model, 71 00:07:23,740 --> 00:07:28,180 if you're drawn to intentionality, even as you know you shouldn't. 72 00:07:28,180 --> 00:07:34,670 One way to do it and to kind of gussy up in more academic ways is to look at Shakespeare's sources. 73 00:07:34,670 --> 00:07:40,330 So as you already know, Shakespeare's plays are all pretty much got quite direct sources. 74 00:07:40,330 --> 00:07:48,340 There are some things that critics adduce that Shakespeare knows about, that if somehow just got into his mind and got transformed and come back out. 75 00:07:48,340 --> 00:07:53,470 But there are an awful lot of books that he had open on the table while he was writing. 76 00:07:53,470 --> 00:07:57,090 Don't try this at home so you can look at politics, 77 00:07:57,090 --> 00:08:02,780 intense chronicles and construct how Shakespeare flipped through the pages of the actual book to mash 78 00:08:02,780 --> 00:08:07,150 up events from different parts of the historical periods that he's using for his history plays, 79 00:08:07,150 --> 00:08:15,640 for instance. Or we can look, as we will do next week at Arthur Brooks poem Romeo and Juliet to see how Shakespeare works. 80 00:08:15,640 --> 00:08:24,040 Kind of on the fly, cutting, shaping, reworking with the with the original source on the table in front of him. 81 00:08:24,040 --> 00:08:27,280 So if you want a glimpse of Shakespeare at work, this is clearly the place to go. 82 00:08:27,280 --> 00:08:31,870 The Bible for this is still Geoffrey Bullock's narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, 83 00:08:31,870 --> 00:08:41,440 a big multi volume work organised by play that prints the sources look so good on the bit so that Shakespeare left out. 84 00:08:41,440 --> 00:08:45,580 He doesn't think that's something that you leave out as a source. Whereas actually, it's quite interesting. 85 00:08:45,580 --> 00:08:51,550 Negative source to think, for example, at the beginning of the source for King Lear. 86 00:08:51,550 --> 00:08:57,280 There's a big bit about Lear's wife, which clearly Shakespeare has just left out. 87 00:08:57,280 --> 00:08:59,950 So we could say that hasn't played any part in cheques based play. 88 00:08:59,950 --> 00:09:06,260 But if that's played quite a big part, hasn't it negatively by being read by Shakespeare and left out. 89 00:09:06,260 --> 00:09:08,560 The books not so bad on the bits that Shakespeare left out. 90 00:09:08,560 --> 00:09:14,500 So one one trick with how to use these resources is if if a source looks interesting to you, 91 00:09:14,500 --> 00:09:21,880 try to find the complete version rather than just the bits that Bullock has edited in that in a compendium. 92 00:09:21,880 --> 00:09:28,420 So Shakespeare's sold his Roman plays for Julius Caesar, for Antony and Cleopatra and for Coriolanus, 93 00:09:28,420 --> 00:09:35,200 not for Titus Andronicus, which he seems to have made up entirely in a kind of Roman pastiche, which has no source. 94 00:09:35,200 --> 00:09:41,680 But for Julius Caesar, I think Cleopatra and Carolinas sources the translation of Thomas N Don't the sorry, 95 00:09:41,680 --> 00:09:47,220 the translation by Thomas north of Plutarch's Lives of the Nopal, Grecians and Romans. 96 00:09:47,220 --> 00:09:49,810 It was published in English in fifteen seventy nine. 97 00:09:49,810 --> 00:09:55,480 The publisher of the English edition, Richard Field, is a contemporary of Shakespeare, also from Stratford. 98 00:09:55,480 --> 00:10:02,550 It seems very likely that they knew each other. Shakespeare must have owned this book or otherwise had close access to it. 99 00:10:02,550 --> 00:10:08,140 We don't really understand how Shakespeare's reading can't work, but he must have had close access to the book over a period of years, 100 00:10:08,140 --> 00:10:17,320 since he uses it intensively from fifteen ninety nine, the period of Julius Caesar right through for the next seven or eight years. 101 00:10:17,320 --> 00:10:21,220 So to ask why Correlates forgets the name of the person who helped him. 102 00:10:21,220 --> 00:10:26,750 We could go to n Plutarch and sure enough in that text correlated. 103 00:10:26,750 --> 00:10:31,100 Also asks for a pardon of a man who helped him in correal. 104 00:10:31,100 --> 00:10:41,220 The text doesn't give us the man's name. He's just an old friend and host of mine, an honest, wealthy man. 105 00:10:41,220 --> 00:10:47,540 So an old friend and host of mine, an honest, wealthy man. But there's no suggestion that Coraline's has forgotten what his name is. 106 00:10:47,540 --> 00:10:53,600 There just isn't a name given as in the tax. But we don't go on to get a little kind of pointless in a way exchange. 107 00:10:53,600 --> 00:11:01,280 What's it called? I've forgotten. So the exchange about in Shakespeare's play about the name of this person has as its sole purpose, 108 00:11:01,280 --> 00:11:06,770 establishing that Coriolanus has forgotten it intentionally. Junkies get their fix. 109 00:11:06,770 --> 00:11:11,630 Coriolanus, forgetting the name of his helper, is distinctively chosen by Shakespeare. 110 00:11:11,630 --> 00:11:17,600 At this point in the play, it isn't just mimicking or carrying forward part of the source. 111 00:11:17,600 --> 00:11:21,410 It's a good, argumentative basis for saying that something is important in Shakespeare. 112 00:11:21,410 --> 00:11:31,730 If you can point to a way in which it is obviously purposefully different from how it was in the books that he was reading, 113 00:11:31,730 --> 00:11:35,060 I guess I'm trying to say that this forgetting might be somehow more widely 114 00:11:35,060 --> 00:11:40,250 significant for our interpretation of the play and therefore not Plutarch is useful. 115 00:11:40,250 --> 00:11:42,050 But if we stay for a minute with Plutarch, 116 00:11:42,050 --> 00:11:47,690 you can perhaps see another interesting shift that Shakespeare has made to the story he finds in his source. 117 00:11:47,690 --> 00:11:55,330 Coriolanus, in the in Shakespeare's play explicitly states that the man who helped him in correal was poor. 118 00:11:55,330 --> 00:12:03,020 I sometimes lay there in correal, out of poor man's hearts, Plutarch tells us equally, explicitly. 119 00:12:03,020 --> 00:12:07,070 The man was an honest, wealthy man. 120 00:12:07,070 --> 00:12:13,490 Often Shakespeare changed his words because because of how they'll scam and clearly wealthy wouldn't have scammed here. 121 00:12:13,490 --> 00:12:23,360 But Rich would have been another monosyllabic word that he could have used something distinctive in moving from a rich man to a poor man in this play, 122 00:12:23,360 --> 00:12:29,600 which he says deeply about class conflict. It's hard to see that shift that's being accidental. 123 00:12:29,600 --> 00:12:32,270 So let's talk a little bit about class in this play. 124 00:12:32,270 --> 00:12:37,760 And clearly, if you want to talk about Shakespeare's politics or Shakespeare's attitude to the lower classes, 125 00:12:37,760 --> 00:12:43,760 Coriolanus, I think it's probably one of the most important place in the canon. 126 00:12:43,760 --> 00:12:51,920 The play begins with the stage direction into a company of mutinous citizens with staves, clubs and other weapons. 127 00:12:51,920 --> 00:13:02,420 It's a play which starts with a riot. These armed men have a simple aim rather to die than to finish. 128 00:13:02,420 --> 00:13:11,510 So they're hungry. They can't afford food. And they are marching on food stores maintained by the patrician's. 129 00:13:11,510 --> 00:13:18,980 Now, this food riot against high prices does have its origins in Plutarch, but there must have been a more immediate prompt for Shakespeare. 130 00:13:18,980 --> 00:13:29,870 The 60 No.7 grain riots in his native Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, which were known collectively as the Midlands revolt. 131 00:13:29,870 --> 00:13:37,160 Basically, what's behind the Midlands revolt is a series of poor harvests and rising food prices, 132 00:13:37,160 --> 00:13:43,550 shortages particularly caused by the new enclosure movement that was taking up arable land for profitable sheep. 133 00:13:43,550 --> 00:13:50,090 Pasture caused rural unrest, all the kind of pastoral things in Shakespeare which or in the literature of this period, 134 00:13:50,090 --> 00:13:55,940 which we think of as being kind of totally apolitical and away from all that into the kind of pastoral economy, 135 00:13:55,940 --> 00:14:02,180 the idea that you would bring a load of sheep into land which had been used for arable crops was deeply political. 136 00:14:02,180 --> 00:14:08,090 The really interesting way of thinking about, say, as you like or something was happening in that looks like an apolitical play, 137 00:14:08,090 --> 00:14:17,090 but it's really sheep are kind of really big in that in the kind of politics in economic politics of the late 16th century. 138 00:14:17,090 --> 00:14:20,780 So we've got these kind of natural disasters or natural problems, poor harvests. 139 00:14:20,780 --> 00:14:30,630 And so we've also got a really important class dimension or social status dimension hoarding by wealthy people to write to to raise the price. 140 00:14:30,630 --> 00:14:38,810 That's always, almost always the case about food shortages and not usually necessarily short in absolute terms or social that people can't live. 141 00:14:38,810 --> 00:14:45,470 But that's short in terms of supply and demand and the, um, pricing it maybe that Shakespeare shows the flows, 142 00:14:45,470 --> 00:14:52,520 knowledge of the complaints of the rural poor in an unfamiliar word, an unfamiliar word to him that he uses in Coriolanus. 143 00:14:52,520 --> 00:15:01,430 The word depopulate, depopulate. It's a word which is also found in the petition of a group called the Diggers of Warwickshire. 144 00:15:01,430 --> 00:15:08,600 Around the same time, Shakespeare's own position in relation to these events, though, is a rather difficult one. 145 00:15:08,600 --> 00:15:15,290 And here we need to get a sense again how far biography is or is not an admissible part of literary criticism. 146 00:15:15,290 --> 00:15:19,430 Shakespeare had himself been fined for hoarding barley. 147 00:15:19,430 --> 00:15:26,370 So he's one of the people who keeps up stalls in order to in order to inflate prices, holding onto excessive. 148 00:15:26,370 --> 00:15:36,900 Stoxx says to capitalise on and accelerate rising prices caused by shortages, Edward Bond's 1973 Play Bingo. 149 00:15:36,900 --> 00:15:38,860 The most negative depiction of Shakespeare, 150 00:15:38,860 --> 00:15:44,040 I think that was ever being kind of wonderfully so is only the most extreme representation of a Shakespeare 151 00:15:44,040 --> 00:15:51,060 more likely to be identified with patrician green hoarder's Coriolanus rather than with the hungry citizens. 152 00:15:51,060 --> 00:15:59,850 The other people in the play now, where the sympathies of the play Coriolanus lie in its depiction of class conflict is really hard to pin down. 153 00:15:59,850 --> 00:16:06,840 It's rather like what we call even handedness when we think it's a good thing in political conflicts like much of the second Dorking, 154 00:16:06,840 --> 00:16:11,660 John, or evasiveness. If we don't think Even-handedness is a good thing. 155 00:16:11,660 --> 00:16:19,290 Haven't done lectures on that, which you can listen to if you want to. Often the history of the play and performance has been the attempt to stabilise 156 00:16:19,290 --> 00:16:22,860 its ambiguous politics to make them legible in the politics of the present. 157 00:16:22,860 --> 00:16:27,900 To identify is Coriolanus someone we were supposed to sympathise with or not? 158 00:16:27,900 --> 00:16:32,070 Leftest re writings by Bertolt Brecht and by the author of Look Back in Anger. 159 00:16:32,070 --> 00:16:36,150 John Osborne had been accompanied by fascistic versions. 160 00:16:36,150 --> 00:16:46,230 It's perhaps not surprising that this not the troublingly hybridise against the politics of Merchant of Venice was the favourite play of the Nazis. 161 00:16:46,230 --> 00:16:50,280 So is the fact that Coriolanus forgets the name of what's Newley in Shakespeare's play? 162 00:16:50,280 --> 00:16:56,910 A Poor Man significant in the light of his general distaste for the lower classes, 163 00:16:56,910 --> 00:17:02,160 his own uncompromising first speech sets the tone for his interaction with the people. 164 00:17:02,160 --> 00:17:07,860 What's the matter? You dissentions rogues that rubbing the poor each of your opinion? 165 00:17:07,860 --> 00:17:14,250 Make yourselves scamps. There's a whole body politic metaphore which goes on very explicitly in Coriolanus. 166 00:17:14,250 --> 00:17:17,190 But this is the really kind of leprous version of that. 167 00:17:17,190 --> 00:17:27,190 It's not just that these people are some lesser part of the body, but they're a kind of scabby H-E really kind of disgusting cut. 168 00:17:27,190 --> 00:17:30,490 And Coriolanus encounters with the people doesn't get much better. 169 00:17:30,490 --> 00:17:36,240 He's forced to seek the people's voices, their votes and their affirmation for his political ambitions. 170 00:17:36,240 --> 00:17:42,480 But he can't bring himself to do so. Accused by one of the citizens in two three. 171 00:17:42,480 --> 00:17:46,050 You have not indeed loved the common people. 172 00:17:46,050 --> 00:17:53,070 Corydon doesn't a tall argue with that and says you should account with a more virtuous that I have not been common in my love. 173 00:17:53,070 --> 00:17:58,770 So he never argues with the fact that he hates them and treats them like dirt 174 00:17:58,770 --> 00:18:03,690 baited by the tribunes who have class conflict as their ultimate political aim. 175 00:18:03,690 --> 00:18:08,010 Coriolanus reveals his true disdain for the people's role in the state. 176 00:18:08,010 --> 00:18:13,210 I say again, in soothing them, we nourish gainst our Senate. 177 00:18:13,210 --> 00:18:24,120 Coquille of Rebellion insulin's sedition, which we ourselves have ploughed for soad and scattered by mingling them with us. 178 00:18:24,120 --> 00:18:31,140 The honoured no who lack not virtue. No, no power, but that which they have given to beggars. 179 00:18:31,140 --> 00:18:36,060 So Coriolanus belongs to the honoured. No, that's the phrase I'll pick from that speech. 180 00:18:36,060 --> 00:18:42,780 The honour. No. That's a kind of version of the of the elect, the group that are born to rule Rome. 181 00:18:42,780 --> 00:18:46,920 This is a distinctly kind of class of birth consciousness. 182 00:18:46,920 --> 00:18:55,620 The people are the coquille of rebellion who fritter away the work and the gains made by the patrician's. 183 00:18:55,620 --> 00:19:00,750 So given current ennis's explicit resentment of the claims of the, as he sees it, idle poor. 184 00:19:00,750 --> 00:19:08,430 Why should we make of the fact that the correal man whose name he forgets has been changed from a wealthy man in the sauce to a poor man in the play? 185 00:19:08,430 --> 00:19:15,300 Is this a further example of his fundamental dislike of those lower orders, a sense that he doesn't care enough to remember? 186 00:19:15,300 --> 00:19:24,080 Perhaps this is a mini dialogue, which is simply another sign of Coriolanus, its status, fundamentalism. 187 00:19:24,080 --> 00:19:26,370 Okay, that would mean that one way to answer the question, 188 00:19:26,370 --> 00:19:32,220 why does Coriolanus forget the name would be to say it's something to do with correlating his character. 189 00:19:32,220 --> 00:19:38,910 It's a sign of something inferior, something characterological, something about him and how he thinks. 190 00:19:38,910 --> 00:19:42,900 Now, if we're going to go along this line, we'll talk in a bit about whether that's a good line to go along. 191 00:19:42,900 --> 00:19:44,040 But if we're gonna go along this line, 192 00:19:44,040 --> 00:19:50,880 it might be that we should actually try and use this method to interpret the incident a bit more in a bit more sophisticated way. 193 00:19:50,880 --> 00:19:58,110 What William Haslet called Shakespeare's super arrogation, fantastic word, super arrogation. 194 00:19:58,110 --> 00:20:05,340 It's the sheer unnecessary ness, the sheer excessiveness of all that, but verbal and poetic and circumstantial detailed. 195 00:20:05,340 --> 00:20:11,710 We might use that here. Super arrogation. Why? Why this unnecessary gesture? 196 00:20:11,710 --> 00:20:15,360 Maybe then forgetting is a snippet of insight. 197 00:20:15,360 --> 00:20:24,150 One of the ways Shakespeare gestures towards a larger, more mysterious interior line of his protagonist's sophisticated character. 198 00:20:24,150 --> 00:20:26,390 Critics would like this kind of incident to. 199 00:20:26,390 --> 00:20:33,290 Something about the character which is not otherwise obvious, since it's completely obvious that Correlated hates poor people, 200 00:20:33,290 --> 00:20:38,360 it's not really very worthwhile to have another example of it. 201 00:20:38,360 --> 00:20:46,220 Freud tells us in the psychopathology of everyday life that even the most apparently trivial of forget things has a motive. 202 00:20:46,220 --> 00:20:50,690 For him, it's the motive of repression or self-protection. 203 00:20:50,690 --> 00:20:59,330 In Chapter one of the psychopathology of everyday life, Freud analyses his own inability to remember the name senior. 204 00:20:59,330 --> 00:21:09,290 And he concludes that besides the simple forgetting of proper names, there is another forgetting which is motivated by repression. 205 00:21:09,290 --> 00:21:14,190 We forget things because we come back to remember them, broadly speaking. 206 00:21:14,190 --> 00:21:19,220 So this kind of theory might suggest that Coriolanus forgets the name for some deeper reason. 207 00:21:19,220 --> 00:21:23,390 We might read it, for example, giving an insight into the trauma of battle. 208 00:21:23,390 --> 00:21:27,560 Shakespeare's very interested in soldiers who come home when we are very interested in that too. 209 00:21:27,560 --> 00:21:33,110 To now such Shakespeare's would come home. The psychological consequences of fighting and so on. 210 00:21:33,110 --> 00:21:40,310 And that's enabled us to see in Shakespeare a whole lot of approaches to that from much ado about nothing through to Othello. 211 00:21:40,310 --> 00:21:46,870 Lots of male characters in Shakespeare have been to war. Even Petruchio in a very, very small kind of throwaway remarks. 212 00:21:46,870 --> 00:21:51,050 But interesting to think what what was supposed to what we could make of that now. 213 00:21:51,050 --> 00:21:58,610 Now we're so interested in the consequences of violence on particularly the male psyche. 214 00:21:58,610 --> 00:22:06,710 So perhaps this moment of forgetting then is a glimpse behind Coriolanus is robotic military presentation. 215 00:22:06,710 --> 00:22:16,140 This will be important in the play because it's a play which is really, really unwilling to give us glimpses into Coriolanus is psyche Keranen. 216 00:22:16,140 --> 00:22:21,000 This is not a play which many people have liked very much. As I was thinking about this lecturer's, 217 00:22:21,000 --> 00:22:28,100 so I tried to think how to take on that fact that it's not just a play that nobody really looks at or thinks about so much, 218 00:22:28,100 --> 00:22:31,670 but actually I think people feel they don't like. 219 00:22:31,670 --> 00:22:38,690 I'm one of the reasons I think for this is that again and again, the play attempts to get to know Coriolanus, the person. 220 00:22:38,690 --> 00:22:49,040 And again and again, it's rebuffed. Coriolanus himself is not very likeable, but the critical history which has not found the play likeable either, 221 00:22:49,040 --> 00:22:55,950 seems to suggest that if a protagonist rejects us, it makes for a play that also rejects us. 222 00:22:55,950 --> 00:22:59,630 Or do I mean when I say that the protagonist rejects as well one. 223 00:22:59,630 --> 00:23:05,600 One argument would be how few lines of soliloquy there are in this play. 224 00:23:05,600 --> 00:23:12,400 Soliloquy has become for Shakespearean tragedy since at least Hamlet eight years before Coriolanus, 225 00:23:12,400 --> 00:23:20,320 a privileged moment where we feel we get some access into the protagonist that they cannot or are unwilling to share with other play characters. 226 00:23:20,320 --> 00:23:26,580 The soliloquy makes the audience special and creates a special kind of relationship between the audience and the character, 227 00:23:26,580 --> 00:23:35,330 not always with this tragic character. So with Iago, for example, rather than with Othello, but with somebody who's there onstage, 228 00:23:35,330 --> 00:23:44,000 the soliloquies we might expect here as indications of that in a reflection, a fractured into a Sobek public asides. 229 00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:51,080 The play is thus constructed in a way that reinforces Coriolanus his unwillingness to plead for anyone's good opinion. 230 00:23:51,080 --> 00:23:56,450 He doesn't take the time to persuade the audience, just as he doesn't take the time to persuade the citizens. 231 00:23:56,450 --> 00:23:59,720 He won't work for the citizens votes. He won't work for the audience. 232 00:23:59,720 --> 00:24:04,790 His good opinion either, because clearly it's soliloquies an enormously coercive. 233 00:24:04,790 --> 00:24:08,690 We know that one of the things when when someone speaks to us directly in the 234 00:24:08,690 --> 00:24:13,220 in the theatre is that we are immediately somehow taken into their world. 235 00:24:13,220 --> 00:24:20,390 However unwillingly we're on their side, we're closer to them than we are to anyone else in play. 236 00:24:20,390 --> 00:24:27,590 So because of in part because of this, because it correlates is so impermeable, both in both in character terms, 237 00:24:27,590 --> 00:24:31,550 but also in structural terms, in the way that tragedy has come to show character. 238 00:24:31,550 --> 00:24:36,260 One dominant strand in this whole play is the frustrated attempt to understand Coriolanus 239 00:24:36,260 --> 00:24:42,440 himself when he is not onstage and sometimes when he is the main business of the play, 240 00:24:42,440 --> 00:24:49,640 is trying to work out what he's like. Even that opening scene that we already just touched on is an example. 241 00:24:49,640 --> 00:24:55,160 The company of mutinous citizens starts by talking about grain prices and their hunger, 242 00:24:55,160 --> 00:25:00,200 but immediately diverts the discussion into an analysis of the play's central character. 243 00:25:00,200 --> 00:25:05,930 He's a chief enemy to the people. He's a very dog to the commonality. 244 00:25:05,930 --> 00:25:13,790 He's also someone who has done services for his country. Opinions on Coriolanus very right at the beginning before we meet him. 245 00:25:13,790 --> 00:25:22,820 Soft conscience men can say it was for his country. He did it to please his mother and partly to be proud. 246 00:25:22,820 --> 00:25:30,140 So the revolt over grain prices particularly becomes a debate. About the character of the play's central figure. 247 00:25:30,140 --> 00:25:36,650 It's almost as if in Coriolanus, political events are merely the occasion for the in atomising of a central character who 248 00:25:36,650 --> 00:25:42,020 can't display himself from the inside out and has to instead do it from the outside in. 249 00:25:42,020 --> 00:25:47,790 This is the play in which inner conflict is compulsively externalised. It's a play full of conflict. 250 00:25:47,790 --> 00:25:51,380 The conflict class conflict, conflict between the Romans and the VOLSKY is. 251 00:25:51,380 --> 00:25:55,370 But maybe one way of seeing all those projections of a kind of inner conflict, 252 00:25:55,370 --> 00:26:04,250 which we're used to seeing through soliloquies as part a kind of tragic South Korea then is thus remains a source and a symptom of dissent. 253 00:26:04,250 --> 00:26:11,000 No one can get a handle on it. And I think there's no one inside or outside the plank. 254 00:26:11,000 --> 00:26:19,190 There's a scene when he arrives in disguise at the stronghold of his old enemy or Phidias. 255 00:26:19,190 --> 00:26:28,730 Most of that scene is about how difficult it is to describe him. The men who meet him there find it hard to describe his singularity. 256 00:26:28,730 --> 00:26:35,990 He had a kind of face. I cannot tell how to turn it. I thought there was more in him than I could think. 257 00:26:35,990 --> 00:26:42,380 The sense that Coriolanus is hard to get hold of and hard to describe keeps keep keeps 258 00:26:42,380 --> 00:26:49,280 coming up and accompanied with that is a sense that he isn't a person but a thing. 259 00:26:49,280 --> 00:26:55,610 I used Folger Digital Texts dot org, which is the best free online texts of Shakespeare. 260 00:26:55,610 --> 00:26:59,720 There's a lot of crappy old texts, Victorian texts which have been put up. 261 00:26:59,720 --> 00:27:06,130 I want to weird things about new technologies is that often the actual fundamental scholarly work they use is extremely outdated and old fashioned. 262 00:27:06,130 --> 00:27:11,870 But you'd never look at it. It was in a book you have to tell by the book. This looks like an old thing that nobody would care about. 263 00:27:11,870 --> 00:27:19,040 So Folger Digital Texta Old is the only and a properly edited, edited modern text online they should be using. 264 00:27:19,040 --> 00:27:24,290 I use that to look for the word thing. One of the one of the aspects of how correlated is it? 265 00:27:24,290 --> 00:27:29,600 Repeatedly people reach for an idea that he's not human. They use this word thing. 266 00:27:29,600 --> 00:27:39,050 He's a thing of blood. A noble thing. It's reported he leads them like a thing made by some other deity, then nature. 267 00:27:39,050 --> 00:27:44,030 Sometimes it's a kind of nothing. That's still the thing. He sits in his state. 268 00:27:44,030 --> 00:27:54,320 A thing made for Alexander Corydon even use the words of himself to express his or is affinity with or videos where write anything. 269 00:27:54,320 --> 00:28:02,930 But what I am I would wish me only he. So this is a reading which in repeated use registers correlate its inhumanity. 270 00:28:02,930 --> 00:28:10,970 He's a thing, not a man. It's echoed in Wilson Knight's description of him as a blind mechanic. 271 00:28:10,970 --> 00:28:19,790 Metallic thing of pride is kind of one of the ways in which it correlates is a sort of superhero in a sort of side slightly cyborg kind of way. 272 00:28:19,790 --> 00:28:31,220 I mean, a kind of externalised X exoskeletal kind of person doing these amazing feats in a rather amoral or kind of troubling, 273 00:28:31,220 --> 00:28:38,600 troubling way would be a prise for anybody who does Carloss cost superhero costume. 274 00:28:38,600 --> 00:28:48,170 Excellent. Only in Oxford. So arguing for a traumatised Coriolanus has made himself a fighting machine only at great personal cost. 275 00:28:48,170 --> 00:28:52,850 And encapsulating this in this tiny vignette of his forgetting the name of the man who has helped him in the terrible, 276 00:28:52,850 --> 00:29:02,210 unspoken scenes inside Correal gives us a brief moment of access to a more a. a more accessible and more broken Coriolanus. 277 00:29:02,210 --> 00:29:06,560 One of things about our current and the superheroes are not from not too far from this. 278 00:29:06,560 --> 00:29:10,610 Actually, one things about our current interest in male heroism is very much, I think, 279 00:29:10,610 --> 00:29:17,210 about that kind of broken, beaten up, reconstructed, scarred kind of individual. 280 00:29:17,210 --> 00:29:25,340 And that's where all lots of heroes, you know, Bond, Batman, those kind of people, that's where they've all got to is in that in their lives. 281 00:29:25,340 --> 00:29:34,730 So so, of course, this is something which we're interested in now. We want to be interested in it 25 years ago now. 282 00:29:34,730 --> 00:29:41,990 It also, I guess, the idea that you have some still on the idea, why does Coriolanus forget in a more kind of psychic psychoanalytic way? 283 00:29:41,990 --> 00:29:47,030 Why does he forget the name? Perhaps, but what correlates is suppressing is the knowledge that we already have. 284 00:29:47,030 --> 00:29:51,050 Coriolanus is a byword for treachery in this period. 285 00:29:51,050 --> 00:29:58,970 The knowledge that he, too, will act against his own side in the future conflict with Roe so is talking about what is actually an act of treachery. 286 00:29:58,970 --> 00:30:05,630 The man in correal cooperates with the enemy i.e. correlates rather than with his own side. 287 00:30:05,630 --> 00:30:09,260 So it's him, himself and his own treachery or his own future treachery. 288 00:30:09,260 --> 00:30:14,780 Coronets is thus forgetting the American psychological manual defines post-traumatic stress 289 00:30:14,780 --> 00:30:19,040 disorder in terms that are strikingly similar to many character analysis of Coriolanus. 290 00:30:19,040 --> 00:30:26,160 I didn't say that because it makes it right, but I say it because there are kind of converging that they're converging discourses. 291 00:30:26,160 --> 00:30:29,850 Sense of numbness and emotional, blunting detachment from other people, 292 00:30:29,850 --> 00:30:35,460 unresponsiveness to surroundings, anhedonia, which is a word I've never used before. 293 00:30:35,460 --> 00:30:39,510 And it's such a great word. It's unfortunate. It means the inability to experience pleasure. 294 00:30:39,510 --> 00:30:44,290 Anhedonia, avoidance of activities and situations reminiscent of the trauma. 295 00:30:44,290 --> 00:30:51,720 So the forgetting anecdote then in Coriolanus gives us the psychological equivalent for the audience of the ghoulish, 296 00:30:51,720 --> 00:30:59,040 which the citizens in the play have to see. Coriolanus is wounds we all want to see beneath the exterior. 297 00:30:59,040 --> 00:31:01,500 Coriolanus doesn't want to show us that. 298 00:31:01,500 --> 00:31:08,340 But according to the procedures, both a Freudian analysis and of character criticism, he can't help but let it slip. 299 00:31:08,340 --> 00:31:12,600 He tells us something that he didn't intend to tell us in this act of forgetting. 300 00:31:12,600 --> 00:31:15,660 Now, if you listen to any more of his lectures or come up in future weeks, 301 00:31:15,660 --> 00:31:23,010 you'll gather that I'm generally sceptical about characterological interpretations to the kinds of questions that players ask us, or at least. 302 00:31:23,010 --> 00:31:28,050 I wonder if there are some more interesting ways we can think about ideas of dramatic character, 303 00:31:28,050 --> 00:31:34,890 answering with a focus on the individual person as if he or she were real rather than a cluster of words on the page. 304 00:31:34,890 --> 00:31:41,190 Tends to skew our interpretations away from the constructiveness of the players, the whole structure of the play as a whole. 305 00:31:41,190 --> 00:31:48,690 It may be to fall prey to what sociologists call a dispositional over a situational view of the play world. 306 00:31:48,690 --> 00:31:53,220 It is positional view means that you believe all the old things are caused by human beings. 307 00:31:53,220 --> 00:32:01,200 They're all that. They're all caused by people acting. Situations mean you're interested in the kind of the broader the broader situation, 308 00:32:01,200 --> 00:32:06,220 the broader circumstance for the extra external framework in which things happen. 309 00:32:06,220 --> 00:32:09,660 And I guess I'm try to move from a dispositional one, which we've just been talking about, 310 00:32:09,660 --> 00:32:15,450 to a more situational one in the sense that identity is a product of the private individual A. 311 00:32:15,450 --> 00:32:20,010 It's a view of human character that 20th century psychology has completely normalised. 312 00:32:20,010 --> 00:32:24,510 But there are ways in which early modern understandings of motive and action were more situational, 313 00:32:24,510 --> 00:32:32,670 no more conscious that people acted as they did because of external factors rather than internal compulsions. 314 00:32:32,670 --> 00:32:38,970 We've also come to see that identities are performed, invented and projected as much as they are internalised. 315 00:32:38,970 --> 00:32:46,020 And clearly, of course, the theatre. It's a really great way to see that. So in the last saw photos of the lecture, 316 00:32:46,020 --> 00:32:51,150 I want to take up the challenge of that moment of forgetting in Act one with which we've been focussing 317 00:32:51,150 --> 00:32:57,480 to try to develop two different ways of rethinking character and how character works in this play. 318 00:32:57,480 --> 00:33:07,530 One is to think quite closely about naming character as a property of the name, and the other is to think about character as performance. 319 00:33:07,530 --> 00:33:20,310 So let's think about naming first, forgetting that single name in that tiny vignette which I've blown up to be so important in the play, 320 00:33:20,310 --> 00:33:27,270 forgetting that name becomes, I think, overdetermined in Corey Linus because of where it comes into play. 321 00:33:27,270 --> 00:33:32,670 The main purpose of the first act of the play is to give Coriolanus his name 322 00:33:32,670 --> 00:33:36,480 because it's not a coincidence that Coriolanus goes and smashes that correal. 323 00:33:36,480 --> 00:33:41,220 Obviously, he gets his name from smashing up correal. 324 00:33:41,220 --> 00:33:49,500 The man who is known in the first scene to the play as Caius Martius gets Coriolanus as an honorific in recognition of his bravery. 325 00:33:49,500 --> 00:33:58,050 About 35 minutes into the play, although lots of other Shakespeare characters undergo status or name changes during the course of their play, 326 00:33:58,050 --> 00:34:06,480 obviously it's quite common idea in history plays. None adopts their new name as the name of the play and how the play, 327 00:34:06,480 --> 00:34:13,020 both its characters and in its print apparatus of stage directions and speech prefix is how the play names. 328 00:34:13,020 --> 00:34:19,410 This character, I think, is worth examining how it comes to know that this person is Coriolanus. 329 00:34:19,410 --> 00:34:20,820 So the play takes his name, as I said, 330 00:34:20,820 --> 00:34:27,450 from the honorific given to CAIS Martius in recognition of his exceptional bravery at the Volsky in town of Correal. 331 00:34:27,450 --> 00:34:32,480 At the end of Act One, his grateful soldiers cry all cry Martius. 332 00:34:32,480 --> 00:34:37,260 Marcia starts their staged action, all cry Martius Martius and Comenius. 333 00:34:37,260 --> 00:34:44,040 The General declares him Coriolanus. That's in one scene 10. 334 00:34:44,040 --> 00:34:52,500 The Folio text printed in 60 twenty. It's the only early authoritative text of Coriolanus which isn't printed in in quarter form. 335 00:34:52,500 --> 00:35:00,810 Before that, the Folio text continues to label the reluctant Hero Martius in speech prefixes throughout the remainder of that scene. 336 00:35:00,810 --> 00:35:05,370 So Comenius calls and Coriolanus, but the play doesn't quite catch up with that new name. 337 00:35:05,370 --> 00:35:12,030 It's not until his triumphant entry as Coriolanus crowned with an Oaken Garland in2 one that 338 00:35:12,030 --> 00:35:19,230 the play's apparatus gives us the eponymous tragic character correal short for Coriolanus. 339 00:35:19,230 --> 00:35:24,210 So there's something about the structure that set about the structure of the acts. It's at the beginning of Act two. 340 00:35:24,210 --> 00:35:33,050 The Carolinas emerges. In this net new name, so curliness his tragic name and with his with it, his ID is the place tragic figure. 341 00:35:33,050 --> 00:35:40,860 Is that somehow rather belated? He kind of grows into that figure rather than being presented at it. 342 00:35:40,860 --> 00:35:43,670 It gives a strange, strange structure to the play. 343 00:35:43,670 --> 00:35:52,070 I think one of the things that's happening in the second half of Shakespeare's career is really trying to experiment with the shape of his plays. 344 00:35:52,070 --> 00:35:55,260 Not something which we almost entirely lose in the modern theatre. 345 00:35:55,260 --> 00:36:01,230 We think of the place falling into two halves so the theatres can make money selling drinks in the interval. 346 00:36:01,230 --> 00:36:05,480 These are players which don't fall into never fell into two halves. They weren't written to fall into two halves. 347 00:36:05,480 --> 00:36:13,160 They fall into quite different breaks. If this is a Blackfriars play, then the ACT break is the most important one because as you know, 348 00:36:13,160 --> 00:36:20,510 Blackfriars candles needed to be trimmed in between the act because the play was lit by candlelight. 349 00:36:20,510 --> 00:36:24,730 So there's something about the naming and the act structure which seems somehow to work together. 350 00:36:24,730 --> 00:36:32,800 I think. Moreover, the new name Curry Lameness serves to upset rather than confirm Martius, its previous name during the Foley attacks. 351 00:36:32,800 --> 00:36:47,210 Comenius names his general, Marcus Cryos, Coriolanus, Marcus Kiester, Coriolanus, and it's a formula which is repeated by a group Omnis Everyone. 352 00:36:47,210 --> 00:36:52,910 So many editors from Nicholas Row, who is the first modern editor of Shakespearean 70 No.9 onwards, 353 00:36:52,910 --> 00:36:58,630 have corrected the names to the more proper, more correct Caius Martius. 354 00:36:58,630 --> 00:37:03,050 Kairis Martius is not called Marcus. That's a different name. He's called Cast Martius. 355 00:37:03,050 --> 00:37:08,450 But in the Folio, he's called Marcus in North Translation of Plutarch Coriolanus. 356 00:37:08,450 --> 00:37:15,380 His new name prompts a long digression, which Shakespeare must have read with numerous examples, which is about how Roman names work. 357 00:37:15,380 --> 00:37:21,050 What's the first name? What's the surname? What's the family name? What's a name you can get for being brave or whatever? 358 00:37:21,050 --> 00:37:24,650 So most goes on and on and on about names at this point. 359 00:37:24,650 --> 00:37:32,660 And that somehow, I think has collapsed into this this texture of naming at this point in the place. 360 00:37:32,660 --> 00:37:36,500 It's odd then to see the Folio commit a double mistake. 361 00:37:36,500 --> 00:37:44,770 Marcus Kiester Coriolanus inverts the order of the names should be Caius Martius and turns Martius into Marcus. 362 00:37:44,770 --> 00:37:51,120 The footnote to the play's most recent edition does nothing to clarify. 363 00:37:51,120 --> 00:37:57,350 This is this is Peter Holland's footnote from the Ardern Shakespeare at the Photios 364 00:37:57,350 --> 00:38:00,200 order for the name is repeated later and hence is unlikely to be an error. 365 00:38:00,200 --> 00:38:04,790 It plays the emphasis on the character of Martius, the man who belongs to the God of war. 366 00:38:04,790 --> 00:38:11,230 Mars, of course, Martius belongs to Mars, but in fact he's actually called Marker's here. 367 00:38:11,230 --> 00:38:21,260 Now, the effect of these models mean that the folio text of the play inadvertently forgets Coriolanus is named in the act of bestowing it. 368 00:38:21,260 --> 00:38:25,940 You see what we did there? This is a scene about forgetting textually. 369 00:38:25,940 --> 00:38:29,810 The play keeps forgetting names. Coriolanus then forgets the names you put. 370 00:38:29,810 --> 00:38:35,240 Either of those could be accidental or incidental or unimportant, but put them together. 371 00:38:35,240 --> 00:38:39,140 And there's a kind of Oscar Wilde quote, waiting to come out. 372 00:38:39,140 --> 00:38:47,690 Maybe there will be a way to extend Freud's analysis of forgetting names to treat the text rather than its central character as the patient. 373 00:38:47,690 --> 00:38:54,290 Perhaps trauma or repression might be for some reason, the condition of the place self rather than a private property of its hero. 374 00:38:54,290 --> 00:38:58,790 Perhaps that might be a way using Freud's idea about forgetting or about error in 375 00:38:58,790 --> 00:39:02,420 the psychopathology of daily life might be worth thinking about textual errors, 376 00:39:02,420 --> 00:39:12,140 which tend to be, which in some ways are the most interesting things about Shakespeare's plays, but tend to be written about in the most boring way. 377 00:39:12,140 --> 00:39:19,850 So my argument here is that the kind of mess and confusion about names in the Folio text here seems more than accidental or 378 00:39:19,850 --> 00:39:26,030 trivial because it's followed within a couple of minutes by that amnesia over the poor man in correal that we've been discussing. 379 00:39:26,030 --> 00:39:32,090 So the play underlines, that's to say the importance of and the fugitive nature of naming, 380 00:39:32,090 --> 00:39:38,810 not description of the way that Roman names are allocated, offers a map for different models of personal identity. 381 00:39:38,810 --> 00:39:43,430 Names can be got from family. They can be got from the deeds of the individual. 382 00:39:43,430 --> 00:39:49,250 They can be they can be got for some kind of particular intrinsic quality. 383 00:39:49,250 --> 00:39:54,200 So you could you can get your name or your identity from your inheritance, 384 00:39:54,200 --> 00:40:00,410 from your own deeds or from something about what you're actually like internally. 385 00:40:00,410 --> 00:40:04,720 These are all forms of naming in Rome custom. 386 00:40:04,720 --> 00:40:12,680 And these associations, I think, indicate some of the many ways in which the play refuses to separate out individuals from each other. 387 00:40:12,680 --> 00:40:17,930 It's got a much more contextual sense of how individuals operate. 388 00:40:17,930 --> 00:40:21,110 The scene of Virgilia and Volumnia is embassy to the exiled. 389 00:40:21,110 --> 00:40:29,750 Coriolanus in Act five is a good example because Coriolanus is is used for Coriolanus to utter the vein, 390 00:40:29,750 --> 00:40:34,070 which much quoted really interesting quotation. He coronate his wishes. 391 00:40:34,070 --> 00:40:42,590 Man were author of himself. Man were author of himself, says Coraline's has this kind of fantasy at this point, 392 00:40:42,590 --> 00:40:47,770 perhaps as many people would do, and be set by their family wanting something from them. 393 00:40:47,770 --> 00:40:54,830 He fantasises a version of his own identity was free of that, which was the name Coriolanus, 394 00:40:54,830 --> 00:40:59,750 in a way, the name that he has got for himself through his own deeds. 395 00:40:59,750 --> 00:41:04,970 Now, I mentioned at the beginning that this play has some potential affinities with the players around it in Shakespeare's writing career. 396 00:41:04,970 --> 00:41:10,130 Obviously, most people will put correlates with other Roman plays because they would think that Roman illness, 397 00:41:10,130 --> 00:41:12,370 real money tax is the most important thing about it. 398 00:41:12,370 --> 00:41:18,590 Or they might put it with other tragedies, which I guess is the drift of the kind of character criticism I've been talking through. 399 00:41:18,590 --> 00:41:24,050 But we might also think about the play chronologically, 400 00:41:24,050 --> 00:41:30,650 looking at a modern edition like the complete Oxford Shakespeare or something which puts the players in putative order of competition, 401 00:41:30,650 --> 00:41:35,600 just throws up some of the things that are going on at the same time. 402 00:41:35,600 --> 00:41:44,160 If we did that, we would see that probably the play, which is closest to Coriolanus in time, is the play parallelise. 403 00:41:44,160 --> 00:41:48,590 And I'm interested in how Coraline's might have thought to anticipate the late romances. 404 00:41:48,590 --> 00:41:54,410 Late romances are all about the way in which broken or alienated men like parallelise. 405 00:41:54,410 --> 00:42:05,810 Likely oddities in The Winter's Tale are healed by the reunion with female family members who returned wife the lovely virginal daughter. 406 00:42:05,810 --> 00:42:10,330 Now it's a sign of the weird gender complexity of Coral Ennis's family, which you don't have time to go into. 407 00:42:10,330 --> 00:42:15,170 That's a really, really, really interesting, really, really interesting topic. 408 00:42:15,170 --> 00:42:25,700 And I guess Janet Edelmann, great book, Suffocating Mothers does what it says on the Tin is the best that John Edelmann ATV LNA. 409 00:42:25,700 --> 00:42:29,870 And so it's a sign of the complexity of Coraline's his family that is not his wife and daughter, 410 00:42:29,870 --> 00:42:35,180 but his mother and his wife, who come to A.M. to try to persuade him not to attack Rome. 411 00:42:35,180 --> 00:42:40,400 But the structural suggestion is the same, that in that five of the play, the broken man would encounter. 412 00:42:40,400 --> 00:42:45,950 He's been my relatives and turn the course could turn from tragedy to comedy. 413 00:42:45,950 --> 00:42:55,040 That's how the romances work. We think that this in Coraline is perhaps is going to bring him back to make him hold to reintegrated. 414 00:42:55,040 --> 00:43:01,910 But in fact, the success of their persuasions, he does agree not to attack Rome, make it inevitable that he's going to die. 415 00:43:01,910 --> 00:43:06,890 He's not like his romance successor is going to have a new lease of resurrected life. 416 00:43:06,890 --> 00:43:12,680 Family in Coriolanus is a sign of weakness, not as the coming players will try to recuperate it. 417 00:43:12,680 --> 00:43:18,560 An ultimate sign of strength, that desire to please his mother, 418 00:43:18,560 --> 00:43:23,680 which we hear in the opening lines of the play, returns as the site then of Coriolanus. 419 00:43:23,680 --> 00:43:29,570 His greatest vulnerability when Volumnia prevails with him not to sack Rome. 420 00:43:29,570 --> 00:43:33,650 He acknowledges that the piece is most mortal to him. 421 00:43:33,650 --> 00:43:43,240 Faithful mother. Mother. What have you done? 422 00:43:43,240 --> 00:43:50,380 Volumnia taunts him with the own with with with this with the implications of his own name to his surname, 423 00:43:50,380 --> 00:43:55,480 Coriolanus belongs more pride than pity to our prayers. 424 00:43:55,480 --> 00:44:01,630 What Coriolanus is called becomes increasingly fractious in the play's final scenes. 425 00:44:01,630 --> 00:44:08,620 And I'll leave you to have a look at that. But the idea that the ways that names circulate around is equally Martius is called Coriolanus. 426 00:44:08,620 --> 00:44:15,190 Is it called boy, which is one of the things or Filius says, which is most offensive to him. 427 00:44:15,190 --> 00:44:20,470 Shakespeare's tragedies are titled to underline the importance of the single name, 428 00:44:20,470 --> 00:44:26,710 as if the tragic form is somehow an exploration of what it means to occupy that name. 429 00:44:26,710 --> 00:44:34,810 Many tragic heroes talk about themselves in the third person and disputes over what a name means or who has the right to occupy it. 430 00:44:34,810 --> 00:44:41,360 Are often the visible or external sign of psychological breakdown here in Coriolanus, the proper name, 431 00:44:41,360 --> 00:44:46,510 therefore, as a symbol of personal autonomy and individuality, it's held up for particular scrutiny. 432 00:44:46,510 --> 00:44:57,370 We see names being made in this play and we see how they're being used and we see something of how that affects the individual who bears them. 433 00:44:57,370 --> 00:45:06,520 Perhaps the permanent forgetting of an offstage character's name gestures to the importance of that investigation. 434 00:45:06,520 --> 00:45:16,180 One last point then about theatre. I've already mentioned the possible importance of the new Blackfriars to the writing of Coriolanus. 435 00:45:16,180 --> 00:45:21,220 Blackfriars was an indoor theatre with a smaller, more elite clientele, 436 00:45:21,220 --> 00:45:26,590 a higher ticket price and baroque stage effects made newly possible by candlelight 437 00:45:26,590 --> 00:45:30,460 as opposed to the Open-Air Amphitheatre star playhouses like The Globe. 438 00:45:30,460 --> 00:45:34,900 If you're interested in finding out more about this, look up the Sun Wannamaker Theatre, 439 00:45:34,900 --> 00:45:40,340 which is newly opened as part of Shakespeare's rebuilt globe on Bankside. 440 00:45:40,340 --> 00:45:46,720 But the somewhat to make a theatre is really majored on lighting effects and how the kind of murkiness of Jacobean 441 00:45:46,720 --> 00:45:53,170 tragedy has its visual counterpart in that the kind of lighting effects that this theatre was able to do. 442 00:45:53,170 --> 00:45:59,650 But I'm not so interested in lighting for now, and I'm more interested instead in the potential class aspects of this venue. 443 00:45:59,650 --> 00:46:06,640 This is a play, as we've already discussed, which has class as one of its most prominent themes. 444 00:46:06,640 --> 00:46:16,720 Coriolanus characterises his reluctance to seek the people's voices in the language of metaphor to the personal political display, 445 00:46:16,720 --> 00:46:25,420 which is demanded by the citizens, is repeatedly characterised by this reluctant military hero as a piece of bad drama. 446 00:46:25,420 --> 00:46:29,470 It is a part that I shall blush in acting, says codenames. 447 00:46:29,470 --> 00:46:39,310 It is a part that I should clash enacting. Right at the end of the play, Coriolanus acknowledges himself as a player again, like a dull actor. 448 00:46:39,310 --> 00:46:47,990 Now I have forgot my part. Coriolanus does not want to be an actor. 449 00:46:47,990 --> 00:46:55,080 He does not want to display himself before hungrily consuming audience. 450 00:46:55,080 --> 00:46:59,610 That's a perfectly legitimate position for a soldier to take. 451 00:46:59,610 --> 00:47:05,460 But it is a bit of a problem for a character in a play and particularly a character in a play in a new 452 00:47:05,460 --> 00:47:13,320 theatre with high ticket prices and seats arranged close to the stage in order to get a good view. 453 00:47:13,320 --> 00:47:18,780 Coriolanus, that is to say, is somehow at odds, not just with the political environment in Rome, 454 00:47:18,780 --> 00:47:27,810 but with the social and theatrical environment of Blackfriars. Audiences tend not to like performers who show that they feel disdain for them. 455 00:47:27,810 --> 00:47:30,690 There's something therefore suicidal about Coriolanus, 456 00:47:30,690 --> 00:47:40,860 not just as a military hero who doesn't care about personal personal hurt and not just as an alienated Roman who was banished from his country, 457 00:47:40,860 --> 00:47:47,970 but also as a performer who goes into a play saying at every stage, I do not want to perform for you. 458 00:47:47,970 --> 00:47:52,980 I don't want to show you. I'm not going to do what you want. 459 00:47:52,980 --> 00:47:58,320 So the disdain that he shows for the play's audience of citizens attaches itself to the theatre audience is isn't 460 00:47:58,320 --> 00:48:05,550 interesting about trust going on there that that although Coriolanus is immediate audience on stage are the lower classes. 461 00:48:05,550 --> 00:48:10,230 The extended audience of Blackfriars are in some ways that sort of London patrician's. 462 00:48:10,230 --> 00:48:16,860 And what was going on that I leave that as a kind of question rather than something that's worked through. 463 00:48:16,860 --> 00:48:22,770 But the question of whether we need to like Coriolanus for the play to work seems to me a pressing one. 464 00:48:22,770 --> 00:48:29,190 And one which criticism has implicitly answered with, yes, we do need to like him in order for the play to work. 465 00:48:29,190 --> 00:48:39,940 And no, we don't. And no, it doesn't. Discussions of Shakespearean tragedy and character tend to be drawn, of course, to Hamlet. 466 00:48:39,940 --> 00:48:47,050 Hamlet holds out his shiny interiority to us like a kind of psychological click bait. 467 00:48:47,050 --> 00:48:52,720 I've never used that word before and I was very pleased to use it. Then Coriolanus reveals itself. 468 00:48:52,720 --> 00:48:58,120 By contrast, to be preoccupied with problematise in the very issue of character itself, 469 00:48:58,120 --> 00:49:01,800 Shakespeare's final tragedy, I think, performs that inscrutability. 470 00:49:01,800 --> 00:49:05,530 The Hamlet talks about Hamlet's always saying you don't know what it's like to be me. 471 00:49:05,530 --> 00:49:11,080 It was like inside me. We thank God we do. We've heard you go on and on and on and on about it in Coriolanus. 472 00:49:11,080 --> 00:49:15,850 We really don't know. I think we not given that access. 473 00:49:15,850 --> 00:49:21,550 So Hamlet talks about it, but Coriolanus performs it at every moment in Coriolanus, 474 00:49:21,550 --> 00:49:25,540 where dramatic identity might be secured through family, through social position, 475 00:49:25,540 --> 00:49:26,770 through the soliloquy, 476 00:49:26,770 --> 00:49:34,810 naming consistent action and self-knowledge all the time to get character turned back on itself in a kind of ironic self-analysis. 477 00:49:34,810 --> 00:49:40,660 Even at the very end of the play, Coriolanus is still subject to multiple interpretations. 478 00:49:40,660 --> 00:49:49,720 This has been a play about the kind of conflict between Carlina's and his almost alter ego brother, friend, enemy or Phidias. 479 00:49:49,720 --> 00:49:54,280 So you would think that they would Ophiuchus would kill him in single combat. 480 00:49:54,280 --> 00:49:58,870 That would be the way that kind of slightly homoerotic kind of wrestling between 481 00:49:58,870 --> 00:50:03,100 more than slightly homoerotic wrestling between them would play out of ideas, 482 00:50:03,100 --> 00:50:08,650 would kill him. And Coraline's would kind of it would be a kind of orgasmic death in a way. 483 00:50:08,650 --> 00:50:16,800 We don't get about Carlina's is attacked physically by a mob in parallel with that verbal dissection of his characters, which the play began with. 484 00:50:16,800 --> 00:50:20,470 We met a mob at the beginning. We get another mob at the end. 485 00:50:20,470 --> 00:50:25,900 In each case, what they're trying to pull apart is Coriolanus, figuratively at the beginning, literally. 486 00:50:25,900 --> 00:50:31,740 By the end, the volsky and people turn on him kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him. 487 00:50:31,740 --> 00:50:34,110 And the stage direction, which is the most brilliant stage, 488 00:50:34,110 --> 00:50:39,560 they're actually thinking Shakespeare draw both the conspirators and killed Martius, who've taken away Coriolanus, 489 00:50:39,560 --> 00:50:44,510 his name from him in the stage strikes no push away kills Martius who falls since I read I 490 00:50:44,510 --> 00:50:51,430 can draw the both the conspirators and kills Martius who falls or Phidias stands on him. 491 00:50:51,430 --> 00:50:59,500 It's an amazing it is an amazing tableau of diminishment, isn't it? 492 00:50:59,500 --> 00:51:07,360 The death of the tragic hero is usually the moment of you a really kind of focussing on them, a kind of moment of stillness or something, 493 00:51:07,360 --> 00:51:11,840 which really even in the act of annihilating them, makes some of the most important thing in the play. 494 00:51:11,840 --> 00:51:20,340 He's got something quite different. Coriolanus is denied life, name, dignity and singularity in this final tablet. 495 00:51:20,340 --> 00:51:25,810 Okay, so I wanted to try and think about that tiny scene of the forgotten line correal to draw out some of the ways we might think 496 00:51:25,810 --> 00:51:33,430 about this would play in the round and the ways we might try and answer big questions about plays in some quite small details. 497 00:51:33,430 --> 00:51:37,030 I'm conscious that the portfolio requires you to write really quite small essays, 498 00:51:37,030 --> 00:51:44,430 quite short essays and thinking about how you could keep the detail of specific play moments. 499 00:51:44,430 --> 00:51:49,120 I'm drawing some bigger issues is something that I've tried to think about in these lectures. 500 00:51:49,120 --> 00:51:56,020 Some of the things I've tried to raise their is about tragedy in generic structure, about the use of sources, about the methodology of character, 501 00:51:56,020 --> 00:51:58,570 criticism about early modern theatre, 502 00:51:58,570 --> 00:52:08,830 about how we might think about the early printed texts of Shakespeare as kind of critical and interpreted points rather than just factual ones. 503 00:52:08,830 --> 00:52:13,780 Finally then, I touched on the idea just now that we already know what will happen at the end of Coriolanus. 504 00:52:13,780 --> 00:52:18,300 Coriolanus was already a known figure before this play. 505 00:52:18,300 --> 00:52:25,010 And next week I'm going to try and talk more about the implications of already knowing that play is going to be Romeo and Juliet. 506 00:52:25,010 --> 00:52:32,890 And my question is going to be, why that spoiler right in the opening prologue to come back?